The Survivor

Scripture: John 4:5-42

John 4:5–42 NIV

5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. 7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 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.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” 11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” 17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” 19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” 25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” 26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.” 27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” 28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” 30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him. 31 Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” 33 Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” 34 “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 35 Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36 Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. 37 Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. 38 I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.” 39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers. 42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

3/8/2026

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes: Standard

Opening Prayer:

Prayer of Confession

God of grace and God of glory, we confess that we often grumble and ignore Your charitable provision. We seek fulfillment in what cannot satisfy past the flesh and the moment. Forgive us and draw us back into Your fold. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Call to Worship

Leader: Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation.People: Let us come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with music and song.Leader: Everyone who drinks the water Jesus gives will never thirst.People: We come to worship the one who quenches our deepest thirst.Leader: Come, let us worship the living God.All: We lift our hearts to the Lord of living water!

The Survivor

Movement 1: The One Thing

What is the most important thing in your life? Everybody has their one thing, their hill they would die on, the thing that they would sacrifice everything else for. This season of Lent invites us to hear Jesus as he calls us to pick up our cross, to deny ourselves, and to follow him first above everything else. He calls us to make sacrifices. He calls us to reorient the priorities in our life to make him our one thing. That's always uncomfortable.

We don't usually like talking about sacrifices. That seems like an Old Testament thing that has no place for us in our New Testament lives. We claim boldly that Jesus was our sacrifice, so we don't have to make any anymore. He did what we could not, and now we're free and in the clear. Our scripture passage today, though, invites us to look at ourselves and our lives a little deeper, and to see what it means to make Jesus our one thing. Today we meet a woman who had been sacrificing everything for her one thing for a very long time.

Movement 2: Two Strangers Out of Place

Jesus and the disciples traveled through Samaria on one of those trips between Galilee and Jerusalem. Most Jews of the day avoided the road through Samaria. They would rather pass by on the other side, even though it may have been a longer route. Samaritans were cousins to the Jews on the wrong branch of the family tree. While they shared common ancestors like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and lived in the same promised land, there was bad family history between them. The Samaritans cut themselves off from the Jews and intermarried with people from other cultures. When they weren't allowed into the temple because of the choices they had made, they decided to build their own temple. They passed this family feud on to all the following generations.

So the scene opens up with Jesus tired, thirsty, sitting at a well in the middle of Samaria without anything to draw water with. Out of place and seemingly out of touch with the history of the area, because most would say he didn't belong there. It was the hottest point of the day. No one was around. They were all resting in their homes or in the shade somewhere after drawing their water earlier in the cool of the morning. There is one woman here at the well. So Jesus asks her for a drink.

She's taken aback because she recognizes Jesus as a Jew, perhaps even dressed as a traveling rabbi. He should know better.

"You're a Jew, and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?"

She points out how out of place he is. Jesus responds, recognizing that she's a little out of place, too."If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."

She doesn't know Jesus. We can't expect her to understand the ways that he sometimes doesn't answer our questions because he directs his word towards our real needs, the truth of our situation. She's confused. She thought he was asking her for water, and now he's saying he can offer living water himself.

"Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and this well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well?"

Jesus tells her,

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

Now for most of us, this sounds like Jesus is offering the better deal. If we listen to his words casually, it sounds like he's offering Gatorade. Not just water, but electrolytes that'll keep us hydrated all day long. He's offering something far more profound than that. For this woman, there's a glimmer of hope, because in many ways she is as out of place in this scene as Jesus is. Nobody should be at the well this time of day. It's too hot, and it's exhausting trying to carry water from the well to your home. She's here because she can't come any other time when other people are around, because they talk about her. Sometimes it's worse, and they talk to her. Sometimes they use their words and sometimes they use their silence. It happened often enough that she got the message. She is not welcome there.

She's not interested in better water. She wants something she can get once, take home, and never have to come back and face the rejection and condemnation of everyone around her. Bear in mind, she's not being judged by Pharisees like Nicodemus. There are no Pharisees in this place. These people broke off from the Jews because they didn't want to follow all those laws. They wanted to make their own way. So whatever she's got going on in her life is enough to make her an outcast even among the rebels. Jesus knows exactly what that is.

Movement 3: Uncomfortable Truth

So in response to her request for this living water, he says,"Go and call your husband and come back.""I have no husband," she says.

Jesus tells her,

"You're right when you say you have no husband. You've had five husbands, and the man that you're with now is not your husband. What you've said is true."

This has been a strange, distracted conversation. Thirst, water, buckets, ancestry, and now the most personal details of her life laid bare. The conversation turns very personal and very uncomfortable. Imagine having that kind of conversation with someone who radiates holiness and righteousness, with eyes that can see deep into your heart. So the walls come up, and she shifts the conversation."I can see you're a prophet. Your people say we should worship in Jerusalem. My people say we should worship here on this mountain. We can't both be right. So who's doing it right, and how do you know?"

Jesus tells her that it's better to worship what you know rather than try to worship something you don't know, and that there is a day coming when people won't worship on either mountain. They'll worship the Father in spirit and in truth, and that is what the Father seeks. People who worship in spirit and in truth.

This woman was probably a mixture of emotions at this point. Scared at how accurate his knowledge of her life was, calling out in the open the things she had arranged her whole life to keep hidden. Frustrated by the way he wasn't taking the hints that she didn't really want to talk about herself. She wanted to talk about those big problems of the world that can't be solved in one sitting. Anything to get him off the subject of her life. To take his eyes off of her. To stop answering her questions with truth that was sometimes painful and didn't always answer the question she was asking.

So in one last attempt, she says,

"I know the Messiah is coming, and when he comes, he'll explain everything to us."

Maybe that's a little bit like saying, "Why don't we just agree to disagree?" Only God really knows, and only God can really judge us. When the Messiah comes, all the holes will be pointed out, and we'll find out everybody was wrong. That's when Jesus does something incredible. He reveals himself for who he truly is. He says,

"I, the one speaking to you, I am he."

<pause>

Movement 4: The One Thing That Fails

This conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well touched on a lot of different things. So what was her one thing? The one thing she would sacrifice everything else for? For some of us, it's power. Some just want peace and everyone to get along. Some people need to be right. Some need to be liked. Some need to succeed or belong. Some want knowledge. Some want safety and security. Some people want to experience all the good things and none of the bad things in life. Some people just want to be loved.

For this woman, I think her one thing was being married. I say that because I've never met anyone who's been married for at least a year or two who said marriage is easy. I know many people who've gone through multiple marriages, not because that was their first choice, but because life happened, choices were made, and lessons were learned. Sometimes more than once. One marriage is a sacrifice. Five marriages and working on a sixth? Most people would have given up by then. I don't know this woman's specific situation, but most people would not sacrifice their family, their friends, their reputation, and any hope of community to live a life of isolation for the sake of a husband, let alone a man who wouldn't even marry her. She persisted, and she continued to sacrifice for her one thing.

Then she met Jesus, and he told her he had only one thing to give her, but it was all she needed. That question of worship might have seemed like a distraction, even to her, as she tried to turn the conversation away from her relationship status. ★ Worship is all about sacrifice. It's about naming and claiming your one thing and then living it out.

In those days, the Jews and the Samaritans did not go to their temples to sing songs about God or hear sermons preached. They went to hear the law read to them: the description of the relationship God wanted to have with them, what he promised to do for them, and what he commanded them to do on his behalf. Then their act of worship was to bring the best of what they had, whether livestock, grain, or the money to buy those things, and offer them as holy sacrifices. To take that idea of a relationship with God and make it real. Because a relationship of love isn't real when we don't give of ourselves to the one we're in that relationship with.

Now, I said her one thing was marriage, but I may have judged too quickly. She was not out there trying to collect as many marriages as she could. Her one thing was to be loved, to be provided for, to have that deep relationship that fulfilled her. She probably would have said her one thing was her first husband. For whatever reason, that didn't last. Her one thing revealed itself to be not enough. So she went after it again, found another person, and that person revealed themselves to be not enough. Then a third, a fourth, and a fifth.

Let me tell you, when we go after our one thing, no matter what it is, whether we're looking for a spouse, trying to raise the perfect child, or trying to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie, it will never completely fulfill us. It may take years, but we will finally grasp that the perfection we seek is not out there. So what do we do? We lower our standards. The next thing we chase may not even be better than the last thing that disappointed us. It's just different, and that's enough. We may even think we're going after better and better things, but if we look back at our track record after four or five major disappointments, we start to believe that our one thing doesn't really exist. Sometimes we begin to think that maybe we don't deserve it even if it does.

★ That's how a young, bright-eyed little girl who wants nothing more in the world than to be loved for who she is can be worn down and worn away and become a survivor just trying to make it through each day.

Movement 5: From Survivor to Spring

That is not the life that God wants for us. There are tough days we all face when we say the mantra: one day at a time, one hour, one minute at a time. We need that perseverance as part of our character, but if that's the only part of our character we have, we're missing out. We're missing out on Jesus and the gift he has for us. He offered that woman living water, and it would do more than quench her thirst so she wouldn't have to keep coming back to this well day in and day out in the heat of the day. That water would form a spring inside of her that would flow out of her, so that she, the one who was desperately thirsty, would have water to share with everyone around her. Water of abundant life.

When we get in survivor mode, we focus on the moment right in front of us and making it through with whatever means possible. We sacrifice our goals, our dreams. We sacrifice our morals. We sacrifice any hope that God might have plans for us bigger than what we can see. In those moments, we can't see much. Jesus, though, never takes his eyes off the bigger picture. Not once. He sees each moment and each need, but he sees how all of it connects to that greater goal.

After he left that well, the disciples were worried about him needing something to eat after the long journey. He explained to them that food, water, and sleep may be necessary to survive, but the thing he lived on was his relationship with God: following him faithfully and serving him with all that he was and all that he had. When he told his disciples that following him meant denying themselves and picking up their crosses, it meant more than giving up their ambitions. It meant letting go of the most basic, heartfelt motivations we all carry. For them, it literally meant sacrificing their desire to survive and making Jesus their one thing.

All of these people had put their hopes in so many things: places, institutions, people. The nation of Israel had a relationship with God like a marriage that didn't work out. Some were clinging to it in survival mode but unable to be truly faithful to what that relationship was meant to be. Others had abandoned it completely, gone looking for other gods and other ways of worship, and found themselves unfulfilled there as well. Then they met Jesus, and that changed everything.

It changed this woman who had spent years as a hardened survivor, who had given up everything and knew she was getting nothing in return, and was still doing it anyway. Suddenly, the woman who avoided everyone in town is running through the town like that bright-eyed little girl she used to be, wanting someone to love her for who she is. She's telling everyone about the person she found who did. Telling them that he was the one, the one they had all been waiting for. She became that fount of living water. All she did was tell her story and point people to Jesus, and when they met him and heard him, they knew they had found their one as well.

★ This town of people who had lived in generations of rebellion against God and his people, who sought to do things their own way, who were all struggling to survive through each day, became a fount of living water, sharing that abundant life for generations to come. They sacrificed their desire to survive and let Jesus make them into something new: people who knew him, who didn't need a mountain to worship because now they worshiped what they knew in spirit and in truth. You can read in the book of Acts about how this revival spread long after the cross and the empty tomb. All of that happened because one woman, a poster child for the least, the last, and the lost, gave up trying to survive. She put her faith in Jesus when he said, "I am the one that you've been waiting for." She went back to face her life and all of her fears with His Spirit to guide and encourage her, leaving her old bucket at that well for good.

Reflection Questions

(pause and tone shift)

Think about your daily life. What is the well you keep returning to, the thing you rely on just to get through each day? Now think about the bucket you carry to that well: the habits, the patterns, the choices that keep bringing you back. What have you sacrificed, maybe without even realizing it, to keep carrying that bucket? That bucket has been useful. It's gotten you this far. But it was never meant to be the thing that sustains you. What would it look like to set it down?

Now imagine you've come to that well one more time, bucket in hand, and Jesus is sitting there waiting for you. If he looked at you the way he looked at her and spoke to you about your one thing, about the life of sacrifice you've built around it, what would he say to you?

Lent is a season of sacrifice, and we are invited to give something up and make room in our lives for Jesus. If you've already given something up for Lent, I want to encourage you: whenever you feel that pull back to it, let Jesus be your one thing and invite him to show you how he fills your life more than anything else ever could.

If you're like me and always struggle to figure out what to give up, spend some time this week letting him show you your well and your bucket. It's not too late to start making him your one thing.

Closing Prayer

Lord, it is not hard for us to see sin in our lives, whether we see it blatantly in ourselves or in the lives of those around us. We know we live in a world where we are all arguing about how to live right, and too often we give up and settle for just surviving this world because we believe you're going to come back and show us all where we've gone wrong.

You don't want us to wait until then to have that conversation with you, and you don't want us to live the life of a survivor. You want to be our one. The one that we've been waiting for. You want us to let go of our bucket of false worship that we use to gather water that only makes us thirsty again. Teach us a new way to live with you where we do more than survive. Where we become springs of life that never end. Help us to be brave enough to let go and to trust you.

In Jesus' name. Amen.