Water, Worship, and Food Defined
Notes
Transcript
Intro
Intro
Set the scene:
This morning we look at a text where Jesus and his disciples are walking from Judea to Galilee; but this wasn’t just any normal trip. As the day grew hot, they needed to stop for food and water at a town in Samaria called Sychar. This is significant, because the Jews had a long-standing feud with the Samaritans who lived there, and viewed them as a “dirty” people who were spiritually corrupted to their core. As far as any Jew was concerned, this town was a spiritual cesspool full of idolatry and sin; and they weren’t altogether wrong in their assessment; the Samaritans were absolutely an idolatrous people that did not obey God’s law. When Jesus comes to Sychar, he finds a people that are spiritually parched, confused in their worship, and empty in their lives.
But this text isn’t just about sin or judgement. As Jesus approaches this spiritual wasteland, he engages it and transforms it into a spiritual oasis in the desert. Jesus shows us through this passage how he alone can bring us new life as our living water, pure worship as the messiah of God, and satisfying purpose as our true spiritual food, and these will function as the three points of my sermon today. When we are done, we will see how Jesus brings new life to desert souls.
Jesus Provides Living Water For Desert Souls
Jesus Provides Living Water For Desert Souls
State: We are spiritually parched, and Jesus is the only fountain that can give us spiritual life
The first thing Jesus teaches the woman at the well about is water. This is fitting because of the detail the text gives us.
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.
Here Jesus is, sitting next to a well, at the sixth hour, which is noon, when the sun is at its highest point. In these conditions, a sinful and spiritually sick woman approaches the well to draw water.
If Jesus were to follow the status quo here, he would either rebuke this sinful woman for approaching, he would walk away, or perhaps he would sit there silently and ignore her. Of course, Jesus doesn’t do any of these things, and in fact he does the most unlikely thing: he asks this woman to help him get water.
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.)
The woman is understandably caught off guard by the request. It is likely that no Jewish man has ever spoken to her, much less asked her a question like this.
But there is more to this request than meets the eye: Jesus does not just want this woman to get him water. Rather, Jesus is going to use the topic of water as an opportunity to teach this woman about himself.
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.”
Here Jesus uses an opportunity to bridge the conversation to what he really wants to talk about. Jesus is not interested in the water at the bottom of the well here: he is far more interested in offering himself as truly life-giving water to this woman. Here the woman sees in Jesus a thirsty Jewish man who needs to refresh his body at the well; Jesus sees a spiritually parched woman who needs her soul to be rejuvenated with the water of life. Jesus continues,
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.”
In these short couple of sentences, Jesus both diagnoses a great need in the woman and reveals the perfect solution in himself. In the woman, he diagnoses a great spiritual thirst. He sees that she is a desert soul, desiring life but finding only death. In a woman who has come to get water for her body, he has seen a woman who needs water for her soul.
But more than just reveal the spiritual need of the woman, Jesus then offers himself as the solution. Jesus helps her to see that up until now, this woman has been trying to satisfy her thirst with many things, but she has found no satisfaction. Jesus helps her to see that when you come and drink from the water Christ has to offer, not only will your thirst be quenched, but you will never thirst again. In fact, never again will you have to seek a source for this water, for Jesus will cause a well to spring up within you that will never run dry.
The important truth we must see from this discussion about water is that only Christ can satisfy the thirst of our souls. This reminds me of a recurring dream I have from time to time; maybe some of you have dreamed something similar.
Illustrate: Dream about not being able to quench thirst
In this dream, I am parched like I have never experienced in my real life. My mouth is completely dry, and I desperately need water. In this dream, I always run to the nearest source of water and immediately start chugging as much as I can, but my mouth continues to be dry as a desert. The water is pouring in, but my thirst isn’t any closer to being satisfied.
I take this dream to be a gift, because it reminds me of what it is like to try and quench our spiritual thirst with anything other than Jesus.
Apply: Are you drinking of Jesus, or just studying him?
Have you recognized a spiritual thirst within yourself? Have you tried to find some way to quench it? Maybe you’ve tried a million different ways to quench it. Maybe you’ve committed yourself to amassing material wealth, hoping that one day it would be enough to satisfy the thirst. Or maybe you’ve sought it in sexual gratification. Maybe its been through relationships, or perhaps in the approval of other people. If you’re anything like me, you’ve sought to use many things to try to quench that spiritual thirst in you; but that thirst won’t get any more satisfied until you’ve come to drink the water Christ has to offer.
Once you come to Christ and drink of him, once you see him as he is and know him as your Lord, once you come to taste of his provision and drink of his fulness, then you will finally experience the spiritual life that we are all so desperate to experience.
And when you come to drink of this living water that only Jesus can provide, it leads very naturally into my next point:
Jesus provides purity to our worship.
Jesus Provides Pure Worship For Wandering Souls
Jesus Provides Pure Worship For Wandering Souls
State: Human Beings were made to worship, and we can’t help it. Everyone worships, although many people don’t realize it. In our fallen state, we have become completely confused about how to worship properly. Here, Jesus helps us to see that the only way to worship in the way we were meant to, is to worship through him.
The woman has not yet fully come to realize who Jesus is; the next part of the conversation will begin to make that more clear to her. It starts with Jesus letting her know that he knows everything about her, even her personal life and the sinful life she’s lived. Jesus says:
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.
The woman here, after Jesus tells her something there is no way he could have known if he was just a normal man, starts to catch on that there is something special about this man sitting by the well. When she perceives that there is spiritual insight, she immediately asks about worship:
Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”
This is highlighting one of the major differences between the Samaritans and the Jews: the Jews received the temple and had the priesthood from God, but the Samaritans sought to worship God in other ways and in other places. This woman, apparently desiring to worship God correctly, asks Jesus to settle the dispute for her. Jesus responds with something she wasn’t expecting:
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.”
While initially helping her to see that the Jews have been the chosen people of God who have been worshipping in the proper form up to this point, Jesus then reveals to this sinful Samaritan woman that a time is coming, and in fact is already here, when worship would change forever. Rather than worshipping according to the forms and rituals that God had once commanded through the priesthood and temple, the people would worship God in spirit and truth.
In fact, Jesus says that God is seeking such people to worship him. But what does Jesus mean by worshiping in spirit and truth? Well, there have been volumes written on the subject and I could preach a whole sermon just on that question, but let me give a short summary.
To worship God in spirit essentially means to worship God in full sincerity. It means to worship with your whole heart, with your whole being. In other words, it isn’t enough to go through the proper motions and rituals. This is something the Jews were constantly guilty of throughout the Old and New Testaments, and here Jesus reveals that God is seeking a people who will worship in spirit and not just in motion.
To worship God in truth essentially means to worship God as he is, in the manner he has prescribed. It means that our worship is aligned with reality; we are not just worshiping the god of our own creation, how we want him to be. We don’t just worship him according to the way we think is best. Rather, we worship God as he has revealed himself, in the ways that he has revealed to us.
To the woman who was seeking a simple answer like, “the Jews are right” or “the Samaritans are right,” she stands amazed by the answer. And then, in a further statement that may even reveal that she is beginning to catch on to who this man really is, she says,
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.”
In response, Jesus lays all of his cards out on the table in an incredibly powerful statement:
Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
The statement is actually significantly stronger in the original Greek text, and it’s hard to show just how powerful the words are in English. More literally, Jesus says something like “I who speak to you, I am.” And the Greek phrase Jesus uses for “I am” is Ego Eimi, or something like “I am I am.”
Why is this so powerful? Because it’s a call back to the way God had chosen to be named in the Old Testament. A long time ago, when Moses approached God in the burning bush, God revealed himself with the title “I am that I am.” Here, as this Samaritan woman encounters Jesus at the well, he reveals himself to her not only as the Christ, but as the “I am.” In essence, Jesus is revealing to this woman that he is the Messiah, the Savior of the world, and no less that God himself.
Apply: And this really becomes the foundation of his answer to the woman. If the question is: “how do we rightly worship God?” then the answer is: “We worship through Jesus Christ, the messiah, the savior of the world, the Son of God.” Through this, we see that proper worship of God is Christ-Centered worship of God. Its why our sermons are centered on Christ, our songs are centered on Christ, our liturgy is centered on Christ, our sacraments are centered on Christ. In all of this, we seek to rightly worship God as we worship him through his Son Jesus Christ.
As we behold Jesus, the Son of God, the Living Water for desert souls, we bow down and worship him in spirit and truth.
And as we find new spiritual life, and purity for our worship, we come to the third point:
Jesus Provides True Food For Empty Souls
Jesus Provides True Food For Empty Souls
State: We can become so fixated on living to satisfy the flesh, or purposeless desires. Through Jesus, we find a fulfilling purpose for our empty souls
Just as Jesus drops that incredibly important line revealing to the woman who he was, a lot happens. Immediately, his disciples return from shopping for food in town, and the woman leaves her water jug there and runs into town. While the woman is busy shouting in the streets about the man she just met, the disciples are left feeling awkward about what they just walked into. But as they come back with their food to their hungry and thirsty Lord, they say,
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” 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 are 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 sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Once again, Jesus is going to use a conversation about basic human needs to teach us about himself. While he is undoubtedly hungry for food, Jesus has a higher truth to teach his disciples here.
He begins to show them that they are obsessed with physical food; they know the seasons for planting and harvesting, they count down until they can have the bounty of the harvest.
Jesus uses this to show them that there is a deeper hunger they have, which can be immediately satisfied. What is that hunger?
Jesus shows them that they hunger for true purpose in life, and that living in Christ is the only thing that can provide the satisfaction of that deeper hunger. Here’s what I mean:
Just like the disciples, it comes very naturally to humanity to spend their lives so busy doing nothing in the grand scheme of things. True enough, we need to feed our bodies with food, and so we need to work in order to obtain that food. But for so many people, that’s where it ends. For so many people, they spend their entire lives completely busy with things that provide them with no level of fulfilment because frankly, in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter. This lack of purpose in life is what led Solomon to write the entire book of Ecclesiastes.
But then Jesus offers a different life; a life in him that is full of purpose and meaning. Jesus tells the disciples to open up their eyes, to see that the fields are white for harvest here and now. And if the disciples did lift up their eyes and look, what would they see? A dirty desert-town, but one where all the inhabitants were quickly approaching them behind a sinful woman with eagerness.:Because all the while, the woman at the well had gone back to tell everyone about Jesus, and now they have come to see for themselves. They ask their questions and listen to Jesus, and Jesus continues to talk until it gets dark, and then he stays for two more days teaching them about himself. After the two days are up, the once-spiritually-dead people have this to say:
And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
For the two days, Jesus was spiritually feasting on the work God had given him to do: preach about the redemption that’s found in him. He was proclaiming the good news about how he has come into the world to save it, and to bring new life to all who believe in him. He was teaching his disciples that this is a spiritual feast that far surpasses any food you could fill your belly with, because this work fills us with God-given purpose.
Illustrate:
Apply: What are you hoping to accomplish with your life? With your marriage? Kids? This year? Tomorrow? Today? Through Christ, you are made alive and given a wonderful purpose: to live for God’s glory by doing his will.
And now I ask you: what is your purpose? What are you feasting on? Are you seeking for purpose, for fulfillment? If you were to open up your eyes to your surroundings, as Jesus tells you to, what would you see?
A spiritually desolate city desperately in need of the good news of Jesus Christ. I tell you, you are living in that Samaritan town right now. You are surrounded by people desperate for the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ. If you are desperate to live with purpose, open your eyes and see that its harvest-time, and God has sent you into the fields to work it by sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
Conclusion
If you can relate to the citizens of Sychar like the woman at the well, if you have felt that spiritual thirst, that confused worship, that lack of purpose in life; then here stands Jesus to offer you life where you only felt death before. Come to him, and your desert soul will burst with new life.
FCF: We do not understand our most basic needs, and therefore we are spiritually dead
CFC: Christ not only helps us to understand our most basic needs, but provides them for us as well.
Big Idea: Faith in Christ is the only way to be spiritually alive