\\ Scriptures: John 4:15-26, 2 Kings 17, Psalm 115

Even while these people were worshipping the LORD, they were serving their idols. -- 2 Kings 17: 41

The Story of Stone Soup

Once there were two young brothers who had gone out to seek their fortune in the world.  They were very hungry and had no money when one of them hit on a good idea to get a good meal in a strange village.  When they entered the town the older brother announced to all the women of the village that his younger brother knew a wonderful recipe to make soup out of stones.

The women of the village were thrilled.  Just think of all the money they could save if soup could be made out of stones.  "Please show us your wonderful recipe!", they cried.

"Find a large pot," the younger brother said, "fill it with water and put in five large stones."  The ladies of the village immediately found a large pot and began filling it with water while the older brother lit a fire underneath.  Patiently the younger brother stirred the water while the women of the village watched.  Finally he put in a spoon and tasted the "soup".

"Ah that is very good," he said, "but it still needs something else. Perhaps a potato or two will help the flavor."

"I will get two potatoes", said one housewife running back to her home.

When the potatoes were added, the younger brother continued to stir and

then he tasted the soup.

"It is getting better and better", he said, "but I do believe the flavor would be improved if we added a bit of ham."

"I have a ham at my house," another woman said, and with that she hurried home to get it.

When the ham was added the younger brother said, "Now if only I had a few carrots and onions, I believe this would be the best pot of soup I have ever made."

Very quickly other women ran to get carrots and onions, and soon many other ingredients were added until everybody in the village followed the smell of the great pot of stew cooking.

At last the soup was done and the two brothers each had a large bowl along with every member of the village.

Afterwards the ladies of the village declared that since the two brothers were so clever in making such delicious soup out of stones, they should live in the village and teach the ladies other wonderful things that could be made out of stones.

If you don't like this recipe, put it in a pot of water with an old brick.  Boil until the brick gets soft, throw away the recipe and serve

the brick.

Intro: I try to ask myself each week as I prepare to speak, what am I trying to communicate and why?  Basically my concern today is that I believe that the Christian community is largely vulnerable to developing a “hodge podge” faith, a disconnected set of beliefs based on sources other than the Word of God, or based on a mixture of current self-help literature and philosophy, success literature and the Bible.  Many times we are driven to know the former more so that we are the latter.  As well, in this modern day, we are seen to be intolerant or bigoted unless we make room for other faiths.  I am not bound by denominationalism.  I serve the church that I love but, I realize that we are not perfect and we do not have everything figured out.  There are other Christian faith who see things correctly where we do not and vice versa.  Only God will reveal things exactly as they are.  For now, we see through a glass “darkly” as Paul writes in what might be considered the most important chapter in the Bible, the love chapter.  And it is love that must guide us in accepting brothers and sisters who see things differently.  The same love must guide us in standing for biblical doctrine exclusive to other belief systems.  This does not mean that we have license to treat people unkindly – it merely means that without apology we declare the truth that first we must come to know thoroughly.

Without this truth people face hell for eternity.  Until we can come to say this with conviction then we will never be fully disciple of Christ.

Let’s read together:  John 4:15-26

1.         A Disturbing Story

John 4:15  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 fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."  21  Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, 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 worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. 24  God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in 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 who speak to you am he."

Here was a woman who was neck deep in moral confusion and complexity.  Obviously dissatisfied with life.  Look at her cry, you can read the despair and dissatisfaction between the lines.

"Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."

Have you ever been there?  The point where life becomes extremely tiresome, the repetition from day to day and week of activity that never takes you anywhere else than you have already been.  Have you ever reached the place where the sin that once enticed you has lost it’s luster and you realize that based on it’s allure you have made choices that have trapped you.  Life has become a long rut and you know what a rut is?  It’s a grave with both ends kicked out of it.

Jesus, if he had been as other Jews would never have spoken to this lady.  In self-righteous snobbery he would have looked for another way to satisfy his own thirst.  But Jesus has never been that way.  There was never a person so bad or so ill thought of as to be excluded from the scope of the Savior’s friendship.  His inclusive love brought him incredible criticism from those who thought themselves too righteous to associate with the low lives of that society.  And so Jesus ministered to the cast-offs of the religious community.  The difference between the two groups was not their sin.  It was their assumptions because the cast-offs knew they needed help where the others never even suspected the possibility.

Where did this attitude come from related to the Samaritans?

Read with me from 2 Kings 17.

22  The Israelites persisted in all the sins of Jeroboam and did not turn away from them  23  until the LORD removed them from his presence, as he had warned through all his servants the prophets. So the people of Israel were taken from their homeland into exile in Assyria, and they are still there.  24 ¶ The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites. They took over Samaria and lived in its towns. 

25  When they first lived there, they did not worship the LORD; so he sent lions among them and they killed some of the people.  26  It was reported to the king of Assyria: "The people you deported and resettled in the towns of Samaria do not know what the god of that country requires. He has sent lions among them, which are killing them off, because the people do not know what he requires."  27  Then the king of Assyria gave this order: "Make one of the priests you took captive from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the god of the land requires."  28  So one of the priests who had been exiled from Samaria came to live in Bethel and taught them how to worship the LORD. 

29  Nevertheless, each national group made its own gods in the several towns where they settled, and set them up in the shrines the people of Samaria had made at the high places.

 30  The men from Babylon made Succoth Benoth, the men from Cuthah made Nergal, and the men from Hamath made Ashima;  31  the Avvites made Nibhaz and Tartak, and the Sepharvites burned their children in the fire as sacrifices to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim.  32  They worshipped the LORD, but they also appointed all sorts of their own people to officiate for them as priests in the shrines at the high places.  33  They worshipped the LORD, but they also served their own gods in accordance with the customs of the nations from which they had been brought.

 41  Even while these people were worshipping the LORD, they were serving their idols. To this day their children and grandchildren continue to do as their fathers did.

Worshipping the Lord and serving idols.  Why is it that we insist on feeling that we can serve God and our own interests simultaneously?  Why do we believe that we have the right to stylize our faith as we wish according to our own wisdom and understanding and still hope to get to heaven one day and in the meantime to be accepted with all our twisted beliefs as “Christian”?

Does all this sound familiar to you at all?

2.         A Familiar Ring

Our society today is no worse than the society that we have read about this morning – we are simply more aware of our own decadence.  And as we have become more aware, we have become less shocked.  And as we have become less shocked we have become more vulnerable.  So today we live in the land of moral complexity and confusion without a standard to guide us and the Christian community, favored as God’s chose people were have ignored the redemptive knowledge that we have been given and we look around us for someone successful enough to emulate.  We live in the image of our own idols.

Psalm 115:1 ¶ Not to us, O LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.  2  Why do the nations say, "Where is their God?"  3  Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him.  4  But their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men.  5  They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but they cannot see;  6  they have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but they cannot smell;  7  they have hands, but cannot feel, feet, but they cannot walk; nor can they utter a sound with their throats.  8  Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.  9 ¶ O house of Israel, trust in the LORD--he is their help and shield.

Does this sound familiar to you?

Because we have ignored God’s direction and lived life according to our own wisdom we find ourselves in the same place as the Samaritan woman.  A mess.

John 4:18 “you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.”

How long do we live before we understand that we are the authors of our own misery.  God grants us the freedom that we want to do as we wish and with the freedom refuses to step in and save us from ourselves.  He lets us come to the place where we can no longer ignore Him and by then, things are out of control and out of hand.  We’re mad at God because it’s now his fault that all these bad things have happened to us.

In one way or another, directly or indirectly what we experience is not the result of God’s will, it is the result of human will elevated beyond the Divine will.  It is the result of people still wanting to somehow include God but intent on serving something else.  Sin spoils and ruins.  There are some here today who are on the verge of making decisions that will complicate and ruin your life.  There may be a husband or a wife who is on the verge of marital unfaithfulness, you’re considering something that once  you would have never thought possible.  There are others tied financially to ethical nightmares in your business life and you’ve lost yourself and your relationship to God.  Faith is all but a distant memory and what is even worse, you have convinced yourself that it is necessary for you to cooperate with this system because you have to take care of yourself and your family.  There are others who hear this message today and it arouses the latent Pharisee within you.  Even now, you are seeing faces and making lists of names.  You are almost rejoicing because you want to see someone else get what they deserve.  Aren’t you glad that in God’s economy none of us gets what we deserve – that’s grace and we can never allow ourselves as the church to dispense anything else to people like the Samaritan woman.

3.         Some Current Implications

There are too many people today who look to the church to spoon feed their spiritual well being.  They confuse it with their likes and dislikes and their preferences.  They choose churches based on such shallow criterion as the style of music, preaching etc. and there they stay as long as it suits them.  They come in and out the doors as biblically illiterate as they were when they came in.  We do not know what we are worshipping – just as Jesus said to the Samaritan woman.

The essence of it all is there mixed in with everything else but indistinguishable and ineffective when the storms beat upon our sand based spirituality.

John 4:22  “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; . . . “

We sing our songs and do our thing and then go out to serve our idols.  We are faithful to serve our idols but we don’t really want to serve God.  That’s why a small percentage of any given congregation drives it financially and serves it faithfully.  That’s why parents expect a nursery for their children in which they are unwilling to serve.  That’s why we look for churches where there are great activities for our kids being carried on by someone else.  We want a place to drop our children to be ministered to by others and it never occurs to us that we hold the most advantageous place when it comes to reaching our kids.

There’s this disconnection between what we think we believe and the way that we live.

John 4:22 “we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.”

And then there are others who get caught up in the worship of what we know.  That’s why the Jews could not accept the Messiah.  Because they worshipped what they knew and they could not make room for the ambiguous possibility that a carpenter’s son from Nazareth might be God’s answer, His promise.  He offered nothing for their nationalistic spirit and pride.  Jesus was oblivious of the fact that the people of God were Roman ruled.  No political system can ever conquer the kingdom of the heart and this was what this Messiah came to reclaim and to rule.

We are so much this way ourselves.  There are those who over a period of time come to worship what they know and they fail to grow and move ahead and learn and experience God fully.  So many of us limit God because we stop somewhere in the past when it seems that we know everything and we miss the daily “new-ness” of God – new mercy, new grace.

So what now?  What are the implications for the church today?

q      I believe now more than ever before in the history of the Christian church, we need to become a people of this book.  We either believe it or we do not.  We stand for it or we don’t.  Standing for it is a matter of living for it.  That is the greatest evidence of your faith – not what you say about the Bible but what you do about it.  If you stand for it you will learn it.  You will hide it in your heart as a sin preventative.  You will shine it’s light in the shadowed pathways of life so that you will not stumble and you will personally embrace it’s standards.

q      If we are to minister to people – the people that Jesus came to minister to then we must be willing to enter into their world and dialogue with them on their own turf.  A Christian who is unwilling or afraid to stand for their faith in the marketplace is of dubious value to the kingdom and stands in a place of uncertainty relative to their eternal destiny.  The worthless servant was cast outside into darkness. (Matthew 25:30)  No matter how right you are and how wrong someone else is, you do not have the right to treat them unfairly or unkindly – love is the only sanctioned response to opposition.  If we cannot love beyond our convictions then we are nothing.

q      Parents – guide your children by example.  Take a look at your life and remember that your children will line up somewhere behind you and perhaps somewhat short of your example.  If you want them at a certain level, then you must live higher.  Grow with your children and become a “minister-er” in the church.  You need to make sure that you deliberately attempt to influence your children to accept your faith.  In the name of God this is your charge.  There are countless others out there who will try to sell your children on their own beliefs.