Sermon Tone Analysis

*From the Fountain to the Flames*

September 7, 2008

John 4:16-26

Today’s message starts as a continuation of last week’s theme on faith even though it comes from an earlier passage in John.

Last week we focused on John 4:43-53, while today we’ll back up to John 4:16-26, the story of the woman at the well.

Before we begin I want you to listen to what Henry Blackaby has to say about faith and miracles.

This article is entitled “Faith That Doesn't Ask” and is the May 30th devotional reading from “Experiencing God Day-by Day.”

“An evil and adulterous generation wants a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”

Then He left them and went away.

— Matthew 16:4

Asking God for a miracle may indicate a lack of faith.

Some feel that they demonstrate great faith by continually asking God for miracles.

They assume that in every situation God wants to do the spectacular.

They presume, for example, that God wants to heal anyone who is sick or provide a miraculous escape from every difficulty they face.

Jesus condemned those who insisted that He perform miracles, because He knew their hearts.

He recognized that they could not believe Him without constantly undergirding their faith with signs.

Their faith was not strong enough to survive without a regular supply of the miraculous.

Jesus condemned this lack of faith and left them.

There are times when we prefer the miracle over the miracle worker.

God calls this idolatry, and He discouraged it by refusing to provide miracles on demand (Jer.

2:11–13).

Sometimes the greatest act of faith is /not /to ask for a miracle.

One of the most amazing statements of faith in the Old Testament came from Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego as they faced the fiery furnace because of their obedience to God.

They expressed true faith when they assured king Nebuchadnezzar: “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king.

But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up” (Dan.

3:17–18).

They were confident in God's ability to deliver them, but they trusted Him so completely that they did not ask to be spared.

Does your faith need miracles to sustain it?

Or do you trust God so totally that you can say, “But if not, I will still trust the Lord!”?

If people are spiritually asleep, you have to shock them, startle them or scandalize them, if you want them to hear what you say.

Jesus was especially good at this.

When he wants to teach us something about worship, he uses a prostitute.

Our key passage this morning starts with Jesus talking to the Samaritan prostitute.

Turn with me to John 4, verse 16 and follow along as I read: /"Go call your husband!" "I don't have a husband."

"That's right.

But you've had five, and the man you sleep with now is not your husband."/

She was shocked.

You may not sense her shock, so I want you to step back in time and try to put yourself into her shoes.

You come by yourself for water.

You avoid others, never trusting that you won’t be shunned by them.

You are ashamed, and so you should be.

So you come alone at a time when the women are done drawing water and the men are in the field.

It is safe.

But as you approach the normally quiet well you are startled when a man speaks to you.

A man speaking publicly to a woman – very strange.

And he is a stranger.

Not only that, He is a Jew.

That is shocking – a Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan woman; but that’s just the beginning.

You recover enough to speak, but you are very soon shocked again by the man’s revealing words.

You stiffen as if a sudden pain caught you; you recoil as if hit by a club; you grow white as one who had seen a sudden apparition; and so indeed you have, for you had suddenly caught sight of yourself.

Your face grows hot and your words ring in your ears.

\\ \\ You are suddenly compelled to face yourself and the looseness and immorality and total inadequacy of your life.

You are mortified.

There are two revelations in the Bible: the revelation of God and the revelation of ourselves.

No man ever really sees himself until he sees himself through Christ’s eyes; and then he is appalled at the sight.

Christianity begins with a sense of our sin.

It begins with the sudden realization that life as we are living it will not do.

We awake to ours weaknesses and we awake to our need of God.

But Jesus simply sits there on the edge of the well with his hands folded, looking at the woman with razors in his eyes.

Now, He is ready to teach us about worship.

Are you ready to learn?

The first thing we learn is that worship has to do with real life.

It is not a Sunday interlude in a week of reality.

Worship has to do with adultery and hunger and racial conflict.

Jesus is bone-weary from the journey, hot, sweaty, thirsty—and he decides: "Yes, even now, just now I will seek someone to worship God—a harlot, a Samaritan adulteress.

I will show my disciples the worship that my Father seeks and how he seeks it in the midst of real life from the least worthy.

She is a Samaritan.

She is a woman.

She is a harlot.

Yes, I will even show them a thing or two about how to make true worshipers out of the white harvest of harlots in Samaria."

Let's go back to the beginning of John, John 4:4–6/.

"Jesus had to pass through Samaria on his way to Galilee.

So he came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

Jacob's well was there and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well.

It was about noon."

/Before we meet this woman who comes to the well, recall who Samaritans were.

They were the remnant of the northern Jewish kingdom who had intermarried with foreigners after the chiefs and nobles had been carried into exile in 729 BC.

They had once built a separate worship place on their own Mt.

Gerizim and they rejected all of the Old Testament except their version of the first five books of Moses.

The animosity toward Jews was centuries old.

Jesus walks right into this hostility, sits down, and asks for a drink (v. 7).

The woman at the well is amazed that Jesus would speak to her. /"How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" /Instead of answering her directly, Jesus shifts the focus of her amazement up a notch.

He says (in v. 10), /"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."/

Jesus says that the really amazing thing is not that He is asking her for water but that she is not asking /him/ for water.

Are you asking Jesus for water, the water that only He can offer?

He calls it /living/ water and he calls it the "gift of God."

But the woman doesn't get it!

Her background has not made her a prime candidate for spiritual insight.

She was simply enslaved to the flesh.

Her spirit was dead.

She simply says (vv. 11–12), /"How can you give me water when you don't have a bucket?

And if you want me to drink water that doesn't come from Jacob's well, then you must think you're greater than Jacob.

Well, if this water was good enough for Jacob, it's good enough for me."/

She's not on Jesus' wavelength yet is she?

Are you?

Do you get it?

So Jesus again lifts the level of amazement (vv.

13–14): /"Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."/

The amazing thing is not just that I can give you water without a bucket, but that the water I give takes away thirst forever and, even better than that, it will turn you into a spring that brings eternal life to yourself and others.

What did Jesus mean?

Proverbs 13:14 says, /"The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life."/

Perhaps, then, Jesus meant that the wisdom he gives satisfies the soul and turns a person into a fountain of life.