Sermon Tone Analysis

Review

A. God condescends to us through the work of his son, by taking on flesh.

He not only to the woman at the well who was a Samaritan, a woman and immoral, and he went to her.

He does the same for us.

b.

Jesus is the living water.

The woman is utterly hopeless as a human in sin.

She has no hope of righteousness, is confused on what she believes, is an outcast from society.

In the quiet and peace of the height of the day, when all else were seeking refuge from the hot desert, Jesus reaches this woman through the power of the holy spirit.

C.

A. Verse 16.

Jesus just told her there is something she needs, and its free, absolutely free.

There is not a thing she can do to earn it.

The woman is still responding with disbelief, incredulity, sarcasm.

A. Verse 16.

Jesus just told her there is something she needs, and its free, absolutely free.

There is not a thing she can do to earn it.

The woman is still responding with disbelief, incredulity, sarcasm.

Jesus here is going to turn the table on her, he changes the discourse.

“Go call your husband”.

Jesus knows her heart, he knows her sin, and now he calls attention to it.

He knows that she needs the free gift of salvation.

But first He needs to deal with her sin.

We need to take note of this.

We absolutely have a duty to go around proclaiming the great and amazing and free gift of salvation in Christ, but not at the expense of calling attention to people’s sin.

It is sin that separates us from God.

It does this in 3 ways

Sin brings us under God’s Judgement: ....”And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done”…we need to deal with our sin, the world needs to know about their sin.

But they think “I am a good person...” they don’t see themselves as sinners worthy of judgement.

already condemned

....And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done

Sin separates us from God because it offends and repels Gods holiness, His holy nature.

.... “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”

And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men

Sin separates us from God because it makes us uneasy in his presence.

Think of when adam and eve sinned, they hid themselves.

The bad news must come in addition to the good news.

Jesus is the lamb of God.

Jesus is the one who takes our sin upon himself.

The woman needs the free gift, and Jesus will give it to her, but it must come with the realization of what he also takes.

Jesus came to this woman to deal with her sin.

Indeed, Jesus came into the world to deal with all sin.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones says:

Jesus is the lamb of God.

Jesus is the one who takes our sin upon himself.

The woman needs the free gift, and Jesus will give it to her, but it must come with the realization of what he also takes.

Jesus came to this woman to deal with her sin.

Indeed, Jesus came into the world to deal with all sin.

A gospel which merely says “Come to Jesus,” and offers Him as a Friend, and offers a marvellous new life, without convicting of sin, is not New Testament evangelism.

The essence of evangelism is to start by preaching the law; and it is because the law has not been preached that we have had so much superficial evangelism.…

This means that we must explain that mankind is confronted by the holiness of God, by His demands, and also by the consequences of sin.

The person who will not admit to sin, who does not admit they are a sinner, is worthy of the fiery judgment of God. and 10 000 years of hell will not be enough to satisfy the debt you owe to God.

You must admit to the bad news of sin before you can hear the good news of salvation.

The Woman’s response

The Woman’s response

The woman is completely startled by Jesus’ piercing knowledge of her innermost, deepest personal thoughts and deeds.

(do not for one minute forget that our lord may see the same in us).

The woman now sees in Jesus the super natural making of a prophet.

She feels a need to atone, to repent.

But she doesn’t know what she believes.

And so, she asks where the right place to worship is.

“you worship what you do not know” Jesus is saying the samaritans are confused.

They have the pentateuch, but have mixed it with many other paganistic religions.

The object of their worship was unknown.

They do not know the true God of Israel due to lacking the whole scripture of God.

Israel was knowledgeable of true worship because of scripture and what God had revealed about himself through it.

The Jews were God’s chosen: for the preservation of the scriptures, the line that the messiah would come through.

Jews rightly understood that God was the object of their worship.

But the Jews despised the nations around them rather than evangelizing to them.

Most people are like this woman and approach religion in much the same way.

All humans are worshipping something.

We were made that way.

But, they do not understand what they worship, and worship the wrong object.

The point is that true religion of Christianity is based on the revealed Word of God.

Worship in Spirit

Jesus tells her again that not only is the hour coming but is now here.

People will worship in spirit.

God is a spirit means that God is invisible, divine as opposed to human, life giving and unknowable to human beings unless he chooses to reveal himself.

As “God is light, and God is love”, (1 jn 1:5, 4:8) so God is spirit: these are elements in the way god presents himself to human beings, in his gracious self disclosure in his son.

And he has chosen to reveal himself: he has uttered his word i, His own self expression.

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

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

().

A gospel which merely says “Come to Jesus,” and offers Him as a Friend, and offers a marvellous new life, without convicting of sin, is not New Testament evangelism.

The essence of evangelism is to start by preaching the law; and it is because the law has not been preached that we have had so much superficial evangelism.…

This means that we must explain that mankind is confronted by the holiness of God, by His demands, and also by the consequences of sin.

D.A. Carson’s Pillar commentary states:

Phillips, R. D. (2014).

John.

(R. D. Phillips, P. G. Ryken, & D. M. Doriani, Eds.) (1st ed., Vol. 1, p. 240).

Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing.

“Both in v.23 and v.24, the one preposition ‘in’ governs both nouns.

There are not two separable characteristics of the worship that must be offered: it must be ‘in spirit and truth’, ie, essentially God-centered, made possible by the gift of the Holy Spirit and in personal knowledge of and conformity to Gods’s Word-made-flesh, the one who is God’s ‘truth’, the faithful exposition and fulfilment of God and his saving purposes.”

Worship in spirit is sincere and God-directed as opposed to worshipping ourselves and wanting to get something out of worship for ourselves.

I will use zech 7:5 as an example.

An earlier generation had been sent into captivity and Jerusalem destroyed, all as God’s chastening judgement for their sins.

But God was faithful to his promise to restore a remnant and rebuild the temple.

As this came closer to completion, a delegation of jews arrived and asked if they could stop the fasting and weeping that had developed during the exile.

Now that God had restored them, the wanted to stop.

God replies: “