John: The Living Water

John  •  Sermon  •  Submitted   •  Presented   •  39:19
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Exegetical Point: Jesus reveals himself as the messiah to a semi-jewish/pagan woman.
Homiletic Point: Jesus teaches us about himself so we can put our faith and trust in him.

Intro

Run around in the Sun? Thirsty
What happens if we don’t drink water?
Jesus offers us something like water, but better! He quenches the thirst of our heart!
Nothing else in the world can do that - Books, food, friends, toys, even religious practice like reading your Bible and coming to church!
What we need is Jesus himself to give our thirsty hearts Living Water so that we can be satisfied in Him. So that we can have Eternal Life.
If you want it, ask Jesus to give you Living Water.
Recap
John’s Gospel - Revealing Jesus as the Messiah. As we have moved through the chapters Jesus has been revealed to wider and wider circles of people. Same story today. The pattern continues.
We need to cover a fair bit of historical information, but it helps to bring the story alive a show us the gravity of this conversation that Jesus has with the Samaritan woman.
Jesus teaches us 5 things about himself that helps us to put our faith and trust in him.

Jesus is Human (v1-8)

To get to this point after we need to cover some ground.
We start with the information that sets the scene:
John 4:1–3 NIV
Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John—although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
Timeline: Jesus was from north Israel, had gone down to Jerusalem for Passover, then was baptizing in Judean countryside. Now he’s headed back to his home region of Galilee in the north.
Why is he heading home? We’re told that it was because Jesus had heard, that the Pharisees had heard, that Jesus ministry was outgrowing John the Baptist. John the Baptist was already a concern to the authorities, if Jesus was growing bigger, then that would probably bring on conflict and crisis.
So heads north, homeward. Not because he is afraid, but because it was not the time for confrontation. The Gospel of John regularly raises the idea of “the Hour”, or “the time”, which refers to Jesus future climactic hour when he accomplishes our redemption.
But in this part of the historical story, Jesus knows that time is down the road, and so he lowers the temperature of his ministry by moving homeward.
But as you can see here, unless you wanted to take quite a big detour, you had to pass through this region called Samaria. And that’s what Jesus did...
John 4:4–5 NIV
Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
Had to? Either it was a function of travel necessity (other options were unfeasible), or, it was God’s plan for Jesus as the obedient Son. It’s actually both! As part of God's divine plan Jesus would meet a woman at this well, on this day, for God’s glorious salvation design.
Why the concern about going through Samaria? It’s not just an inconvenience - to Get to QLD you have to go through NSW - No, this travel route has spiritual significance.
If you’ve spent any time reading or watching about the conflict in Ukraine right now, you will have come across people saying “In order to understand this conflict, we need to go back 10 years, or 50 years or 200 years.”
That’s the case here. In order to understand the issue with Samaria, we need to go back several hundred years.
The region was part of the promised Land - given by God to Jacob’s (Israel’s) decedents. Jacob got to buy a tract of land there, but it would be his kids kids kids who got to live there. Nonetheless Jacob’s bones were buried on the tract of land.
When the descendants entered the land, the people stood on two mountains to pronounce the blessings and the curses of the Moses Covenant. If you obey, there will be blessings. Rebellion meant terrible consequences . The mountain of blessing was Mount Gerizim, right around the corner from Jacob's block of land.
The people didn’t obey the Covenant. They rebelled. God was patient and kind with them, but they continued in evil. He brought judgment and wrath against His people.
By this time the land of Israel had divided into two kingdoms - Judah with it’s capital city Jerusalem, and Israel with it’s capital city Samaria.
The northern kingdom of Israel was the first to fall. All the most important people of society were sent into exile by the Assyrians. Everyone who was noble birth, educated, tradespeople, etc. Effectively anyone who could foment a uprising was shipped of and settled in a foreign land.
Other settlers were brought in by the Assyrians to live in the area that used to be Israel. They settled down among the remaining Israelite people there and eventually intermarried. So you had this group of people who had lost their distinctive Israelite identity, not because of ethnic mixing, but because of their compromises around faith.
Yet even so, many of them wanted to remain Israelites, and try to live by the Covenant of Moses. They held onto the first five books of the OT, the Torah. And they tried to live by them.
These people became known as Samaritans, because of the area they were from in the Region of Samaria.
When many of the Israelites returned to their land after exile, they didn’t recognize the Samaritans as true Israelites. They saw them as having given up their distinct identity by intermarrying with other nations.
So there arose a fair bit of animosity between the two groups. Israelites, now referred to as Jews, considered Samaritans essentially as pagans or gentiles, that is people who are outside God’s spiritual family. While the animosity was primarily related to religious matters, racial/ethnic issues would have been tied up in it all.
So it was a big deal to travel through Samaritan territory. Even though it was historically part of Israel, it was now considered occupied territory, inhabited by unclean cultists.
Yet, Jesus had to go there. It was the best route to Galilee.
And....
Jesus was a man.
He needed to rest his human body.
He needed a drink of water.
John 4:6–8 NIV
Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
They had to walk everywhere. Carts, chariots and horses were only for the wealthy. Most people walked.
And Jesus got tired.
Jesus is the Son of God! He has unlimited access to the Holy Spirit! Yet he was a human just like us who grew tired, and needed to rest.
This gives us great comfort, to know that Jesus Christ is not some far off and unfeeling Savior, no, he is a man, who has walked a mile, or two, in our shoes. He has known our frailty. He has lived through our temptations.
Hebrews 4:15 NIV
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.
Jesus need to stop and rest. He is Human. He had to walk and travel and drink water to quench his thirst.

Jesus Gives Living Water (v9-15)

So Jesus the man, needs to rest and have a drink. They have stopped right near the block of land that Jacob had passed to his son. There is a well there that most people believed Jacob had dug to supply his flocks.
A lady came over to use the well. And he asks the lady: “could I have some water?”
John 4:9 NIV
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.)
That last line is probably better translated “Jews do not share dishes with Samaritans” - it may be in a little footnote in your Bible. Either translation drives home a stark point here - Jesus is doing something that we might call “culturally insensitive”.
Jesus is crossing the bounds of social norms.
As we said, the Jews considered the Samaritans unclean. So to mix with them, or to share a drinking cup, would make you ceremonially unclean in their eyes!
So the lady is taken aback! Don’t you realize I’m a Samaritan? It wouldn’t be “proper”!
Yes, Jesus did know who she was, but he was asking her a favor, as part of his invitation to eternal life. He was not concerned with matters of ceremonial cleanliness or social convention, or even the cup of water! He wanted to address the woman underneath and lead her to eternal life!
Jesus shows this in his response:
John 4:10 NIV
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.”
Jesus talks about himself in the thrid person, but makes the point: “If you knew who I am, you would be asking me for a drink!”
But not just any drink: Living Water.
Like in the previous chapter, when Jesus was talking to Nicodemus, he said you need to be “Born again” to receive eternal life. “Born again” also means “born from above” - it has that double meaning that invokes both a physical and spiritual understanding.
Living Water is the ancient way of saying “fresh water” - The clean water that comes straight from the mouth of a spring. It’s not the stuff that’s been sitting exposed for a while, or stored in a musty cistern. It’s the fresh, clean, purest water they could get.
But Jesus is making that spiritual point, he is talking about a image of spiritual reality. I would have given you the cleanest, freshest, thirst-quenching water of eternal life!
But like Nicodemus, the lady initially misses the spiritual meaning of what Jesus is saying:
John 4:11–12 NIV
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 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?”
The lady is confused - “You don’t even have the implements to draw up the “living water” from the base of this well. Do you think you can do a better job than our honorable forefather Jacob?”
Fun fact, the well is fed by a spring, and is still running to this day! But Jesus wasn’t talking about the well water, as good as it was. He explains:
John 4:13–14 NIV
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 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.”
The physical water from the spring/well in front of them is great for quenching a thirst, but it cannot quench the thirst of our hearts for joy-filled, abundant, fulfilling life!
We have a little filtered water spout on our kitchen sink that filters out any smells and particulates from our drinking water. It’s one of the great modern inventions - we can reliably go to our tap and pour out clean, fresh, life-sustaining water!
But after I have a drink, I have to come back again later to get some more.
And then some more.
And then some more...
We need to drink a couple litres of water a day to stay in good health!
We need to return again and again to get water!
But Jesus promises living water, a spiritual thirst quencher that only needs one dose! Once drunk, this living water turns you into a water source, a spring that wells up to eternal life!
The Samaritan lady still doesn’t get it.
She’s still thinking about the literal water. But, her interest is piqued: “If this strange Jewish man has access to this miracle-water, and it is offered to me, I want it!”
John 4:15 NIV
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.”
This lady makes her first steps of faith, as muddled as they were, by asking Jesus to supply her need.
Jesus offered her Living Water, and she said “please, give it to me”.
How many of us can identify with this lady? When we first started to put our faith and trust in Jesus, we had all kinds of muddled ideas about what it was that we were doing, or asking for. But Jesus meets us in our need. He doesn’t wait for us to get all sorted in our theology, or get our lives in order before he offers to us the eternal life that he secured for us on the Cross.
You may have come to Jesus seeking earthly things like health, wealth and self-serving pleasure, but thankfully Jesus breaks through that to give us what we really need - the revival of our souls!
Jesus Gives Living Water, that wells up to eternal life. He gives the heavenly rebirth by the Holy Spirit. If you want this thirst quenched - ask Him!

Jesus Knows our Lives (v16-18)

Jesus seems to abruptly change tack, but, this is actually right in line with what he has been doing.
Jesus has invited the Samaritan woman to believe in him. He is evangelizing her! He is inviting her to become a disciple! And in order to become a true disciple of Jesus, we need to be faced with the depth of our own need.
Jesus leads this lady to face her own shame and guilt:
John 4:16–18 NIV
He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 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.”
This lady, who has been quite chatty up till now, is very abrupt in here response. When Jesus says “Go, call your husband and come back”, she replies with only three words in the Greek - “I have no Husband”. It’s short and sharp.
Jesus knew this woman’s background. He knew her past. And it was not something that she was all that keen to discuss in detail!
This would have been utterly shameful to this woman in her context. The NT teaches us that celibate singleness is a noble, even envious estate. Marriage too is a godly estate. Whichever God has for you, you should use it to God’s glory!
But in the time and place of this story, the culture would have basically pushed all women to be married. If not explicitly, just the nature of being a single woman would make you vulnerable. There were no such thing as independent career women in Palestine. Your security and provision came from being connected to a family household. And for a young woman, that either meant being in your own birth-family home, or married and in your husband’s home.
If you were divorced, you were not likely to be able to return to your family of origin, and you were less likely to be considered a marriageable material. It put you in a precarious position!
Now our Smaritain woman, she’s been married 5 times. Even in our world that normalizes sexual perversion and promiscuity, getting married 5 times is a lot!
Some of those husbands may have died, but probably not all of them. She may have been unfairly divorced by dodgy blokes, but I think we can assume that she would have had something to do with the reason she was so often un-married. Her fellow citizens probably thought she was cursed.
Whether it was her fault or not, she would have carried a deep sense of shame and guilt. She was probably now considered un-marriable.
This would explain why she is now living with her boyfriend.
This isn’t so hard to imagine, a woman who’s fallen on hard times, doesn’t have a job. She shack’s up with some drop-kick who doesn’t treat her well. And she puts up with it because she feels trapped. She feels like she has no other options.
This doesn’t excuse the actions, but it helps us understand how this woman could have ended up where she was.
Interestingly, this is the social opposite of Nicodemus from Chapter 3:
High-status, educated, Jewish, man of great reputation, vs.
Low status, gentile, woman of ill-repute.
What this shows us is that Jesus receives people from any background. He cares little for social standing, or ethnic background.
He will give eternal life to anyone who asks.
Even us.
Many of us have known the depths of shame and guilt. Many of us carry deep scars from our past,
Many of us carry deep scars from our sexual history, this is something that is so rife, so pervasive in our society, that we cannot minimize the sin committed by us, or against us in this realm. Satan wreaks such destruction in this realm. But more broadly....
Many of us carry deep scars from the way we have hurt and betrayed people,
Many of us carry deep scars from the way that we have been hurt by others,
Yet,
Jesus know what you did.
Jesus know what you suffered,
And he holds out the hope of redemption and eternal life nonetheless.
No matter how dirty, or unclean, or unworthy you feel, Christ can make you clean!
Christ can quench the deep thirst of your heart for satisfaction and eternal fulfillment!
Jesus knows our lives, and meets us in the middle of our mess with Hope.
Curiously, even though this lady has lived this experience, and reports it to Jesus as “i have no husband”. Jesus makes an assessment of the truthfulness of the statement!
Jesus is the standard and source of truth. Even the truth of our own lives. We can deceive ourselves, yet the Words of Christ, the whole of the scriptures, will expose the truth of what our own lives are. They will inevitably expose our sinfulness and our need, just like that Samaritan woman.

Jesus Makes True Worshipers (v19-24)

Coming back to our story: faced with her baggage the lady tries to change the subject, although not completely. She appear to still be searching and inquiring and hoping for truth.
John 4:19–20 NIV
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
Change the subject to a Theological discussion!
The corrupted Torah - worship a Gerizim instead of Jerusalem.
Jesus cuts through the argument - it won’t matter because it’s being superceded!
John 4:21–24 NIV
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 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. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
The physical localities of worship will soon be a moot point.
You guys are still wrong though - you don’t know God (like the cults JW & Mormons etc, close but no cigar)
Salvation is coming from God’s people....
The hour is coming (furture) but is now here! (present) The very fact of Jesus having come means the hour is arriving, even if the climactic moments are still to come. Jesus is the temple, so the other temples are undermined.
Spirit and in truth - The Holy Spirit powered (rebirth) and in the Truth, Jesus, Word of God from the Father.
Real worship happens via the work of the Spirit and in Jesus. This is why cults are outside. No other path to the Father.
This is what God is seeking - true worshipers.
Jesus has to form them out of the masses of false worshipers!

Jesus is the Christ (v25-26)

The Lady rightly understand that these ideas are connected to the coming of the messiah:
John 4:25 NIV
The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Even their corrupted Torah revealed their need for a prophetic restorer. The Samaritan woman was hoping for the day when everything would be revealed.
Little did she know, he was right in front of her! Or maybe she suspected that this strange Jew was the messiah, and so she brought up the topic!
Astounding statement!
John 4:26 NIV
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Jesus is often cagey with Jewish people about this, maybe to head off bad pre-conceptions. But here he says it plainly.
Jesus is the long awaited messiah.
Jesus is the King.
Jesus is the Prophet.
Jesus is the Priest.
Jesus is the fulfillment of all the OT. Everything pointed to Him.

Conclusion

Jesus teaches us 5 things about himself that helps us to put our faith and trust in him.
Jesus is Human (v1-8)
Jesus gives Living Water (v9-15)
Jesus knows our lives (v17-18)
Jesus makes True Worshipers (v19-24)
Jesus is the Christ (v25-26)
References:
Carson’s Pillar Commentary on John.
Hutcheson’s commentary on John
Hendrickson’s commentary on John
Sermons by Richard D. Philips,
Sproul, R. C., ed. The Reformation Study Bible: English Standard Version. Orlando, FL; Lake Mary, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2005.
Phillips, Richard D. John. Edited by Richard D. Phillips, Philip Graham Ryken, and Daniel M. Doriani. 1st ed. Vol. 1 & 2 of Reformed Expository Commentary. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2014.
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