Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Good morning Campus Church!

If you have your Bibles why don’t you go ahead and grab those and turn with me to John chapter 4.

While you are doing that let me just welcome you to Campus Church!

We are so glad that you are here!

If you are new this morning please fill out one of those connection cards and get that back to one of our volunteers wearing a lanyard.

If you are new this morning or you missed last week we are continuing our sermon series entitled Behold.

We are walking through John’s Gospel and looking at who Jesus is.

Last week, Pastor Barry opened up a very familiar passage of Scripture… , where Jesus encountered Nicodemus.

Jesus told him that he needed to be born again in order to see the Kingdom of God.

He explained to him that God loved the World so much that he sent Jesus… his Son… into the World to save from condemnation.

Such a great passage of Scripture.

Today we get another awesome passage of Scripture. .

And what I want you to consider today is

Jesus as missionary sent by God to intentionally reach unlikely people.

Jesus as missionary sent by God to intentionally reach unlikely people.

I love reading about Christians who lived long ago and were used by God to do incredible things for the sake of the Kingdom.

This week I was reading about a guy by the name of Hudson Taylor.

Hudson lived in the 1800’s and he is known for his mission work in China in the mid 1800’s to the early 1900’s… Around the time Wong Fei Hung (one of my Kung Fu heroes)… He has a really insane story.

Taylor was born to James and Amelia Taylor, a Godly couple who were absolutely fascinated with the Eastern Asia.

This is what they prayed for their newborn son, "Grant that he may work for you in China."

Years later, a teenage Hudson Taylor experienced a saving faith in Jesus during an intense time of prayer laying stretched out on the floor... his words are that he was, "before Him with unspeakable awe and unspeakable joy."

He spent the next years in frantic preparation, learning the rudiments of medicine, studying Mandarin Chinese, and immersing himself even deeper into the Bible and prayer.

Hudson Taylor spent 51 years in China preaching the gospel, ministering to those in need, and translating the Bible into Chinese.

He founded the China Inland Mission which is known today as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship.

And what is so great about Hudson Taylor and what made him so effective in his ministry is that he was Intentional in his mission.

From the time he first got there as a young man he he decided to dress in Chinese clothes and grow a braid (as Chinese men did).

He hated how the missionaries that were there were spending all of their time near ports with business men who could help them translate.

They made no attempts at learning the language or learning their culture.

Hudson wanted to take the gospel to the inland.

To where there were Chinese who not only have never heard of Jesus but who haven’t even seen a foreigner before.

Everything that Hudson Taylor did was intentional to reaching people with the good news of Jesus.

You see, he saw Jesus as the one who was sent by God and he saw Jesus as the one who sends his disciples into the world to make disciples of all people.

No matter how different they are.

God has a heart for the nations of the World and he gives us this same heart.

God gives us a heartbeat for the nations that transcends cultural and racial barriers.

And Jesus himself demonstrates that for us today in our text.

So if you have your Bibles opened to John chapter for look with me starting in verse 1...

4 Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2(although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 4 And he had to pass through Samaria.

5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.

6 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.

7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water.

Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”

8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.)

9 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.) 10 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.”

11 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?

12 Are you greater than our father Jacob?

He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”

13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 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.”

15 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.”

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”

17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.”

Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.

What you have said is true.”

19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.

22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

23 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.

24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

25 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.”

26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Let’s Pray.

Father, thank you for sending Jesus to seek us out.

For coming and taking our place on the cross.

We do not deserve it but you loved us that much.

Holy Spirit, come now and open our ears, eyes, and hearts to see our sin and to understand your Word.

In your Sons name… Amen.

This morning I want us to see three things about Jesus in .

If you are taking notes this is the first thing...

Point I: Jesus was intentional with the mission God gave him (4:1-6).

Have you ever thought about this?

Jesus is a missionary.

God sent Jesus from heaven to a people (us) that did not know God to preach good news and see lives changed.

When we go to a foreign land that does not know God we are walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

When we live on mission where God has sent us we are walking in Jesus’ footsteps.

Even this campus and the classes and the place that you work is a place to be a missionary.

We’ve said so many times here but God has sent you where you are primarily to make disciples of Jesus.

Are you being intentional where you are? Look at Jesus in verses 1-6...

Jesus knew that God sent him here to make disciples.

To pay for the sins of anyone, not just the Jews, who would believe in him.

If you remember from the chapter before this one Jesus told Nicodemus...

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Jesus was sent by God to be the savior for all who believed regardless of where they are from.

This is what I’m thinking.

Jesus is doing ministry.

He seeing fruit.

People are believing.

And everything that he is doing he is not just doing for the sake of seeing as many people believe as possible… he’s also doing all this to disciple the 12 that are with him.

His 12 disciples are learning from Jesus what it means to live an intentional life.

He is demonstrating in chapter 4.

We see in verse one that Jesus hears that there may be some trouble from the Pharisees pretty soon so he decides it’s time to go back to Galilee.

I don’t think that it’s because he’s afraid of some conflict or some hard ministry.

I think it’s because he knows 1) there’s more work to be done before he is murdered by these people and 2) his disciples still have so much to learn about the mission.

Look at verse 4. John says that he had to pass through Samaria.