Morning, brothers and sisters.
First, I’d like to apologize to anybody who was in the place where the couches are last time I spoke. I heard they piped in my singing, and I’m sorry you had to hear that. I’m thankful, though—the Lord says, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord.”
Let’s go ahead and open to John 20 and look at the verses that, really, I think, talk about what the Gospel of John is—the theme verses. John 20, starting with verse 30:
And many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book:
but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
and that believing ye may have life in His name.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, I’m so glad that I can hide myself this morning in Your Son, the Lord Jesus. And I thank You, Lord, that You know all about me, and You know about everybody in this room. Yet You have not thought that it was below You to come and save us.
We ask today, as we come to Your Word, that some of us who know so much of Your Word will not be seeking something new, but will be seeking something fresh from You. We pray for those who have just heard it but never really take time to look at it, understand it, and think about what is in it, that their hearts might be captured this morning by something in Your Word that would lead them to life and understanding.
Lord, only You can open Your Word to us. So we come to You and ask that You would be gracious to us and open Your Word to us, so that we could not just see You, but we could be encouraged. We could be lost in You. We could forget about all the things that we think we have against us and come and find, Lord, who You are and what You are for us.
We come to You only because we have nowhere else to go. Our understanding just cannot bring us the things that we need. Our understanding cannot help us. Only You can. So we appeal to You this morning that You would open the Word to us. Let us taste of the life that is in it. In Christ’s name. Amen.
You can see we’re in John 4, and I’m not going to review things, because there is no review here. It just keeps going.
What I would like to do in looking at John 4 is look at a few things that we want to see in the chapter. I don’t have, so to speak, a prophetic ministry—and I’m not saying that I should, and I’m not downing anything—but my burden is that we read the Word and find out from the Lord what is in the Word.
We see it rote by rote, little by little, until the Lord can open it up to us. That is really the burden behind my going through little books here and there: so we know the Word. The Word is something that can break a rock. That is really what has been behind my wanting to do things like this.
As we look at John 4, we are going to look at a few things:
Teaching without application is not good enough. It must have application with it. Instead of reading the whole section at once, I thought this time we would do things a little differently.
Let’s look at why Jesus is in Samaria. Start with the first four verses of John 4:
When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John
(although Jesus Himself baptized not, but His disciples),
He left Judaea, and departed again into Galilee.
And He must needs pass through Samaria.
So the question is, why is He going through Samaria? He is going back up to Galilee, and it is because He is getting popular. The Lord’s ministry is getting popular. Even in John 3, the disciples of John were saying, “Wait a minute, here this One that you bore witness to is baptizing, and more people are coming to Him.”
He is getting even more popular than John the Baptist, and this might be a problem. One of the things we are going to find in John is the statement, “It was not His time yet.” That applies to this, even though we do not read it right here. It was not His time yet. The popularity of Him for this time was not the time yet, so He leaves and goes through Samaria.
A lot of people will say, “He needed to go through Samaria,” and they will make big sermons on that. We will talk about that a little later. The thing is, He went through Samaria. That is why He is going.
Now, where is Samaria? Here is the map of Israel. You can see He was in Jerusalem for the Passover feast, and now He is going back up to Nazareth, Cana, and Capernaum—that area there. Really, the most direct route to get there is through Samaria.
What is really strange about it is that people from Judea—the priests, the scholarly people, the upper-class type people—would not go through Samaria. They would cross the Jordan, go through Perea, and then come all the way up into Galilee, bypassing the area.
I think that is really interesting because Perea is where the Gadarenes were. You remember the story of the Gadarenes? That is where the demoniac who had the legion of demons was. Jesus cast the demons into a herd of pigs.
They would not go through Samaria, which the Jews did not look at as an unclean place. They did not say it was unclean, and they did not say it was heathen. But they would go through a place where Jews were breaking the law. It was okay to go through that place, but you did not go through Samaria. I do not know how their minds got around that, but that is what they did. Maybe they should have just taken a boat.
Now, who are the Samaritans? To find out who the Samaritans are, you have to go to 2 Kings 17:24-41. It tells all about the Samaritans.
Remember Israel and Judah. Israel was split into two kingdoms. You had the ten tribes, the northern kingdom of Israel, and then you had Judah and Benjamin in the southern part.
The northern kingdom was carried away into captivity around 722 BC, when the Assyrians came into power. The way the Assyrians did things was that, once they captured people, to make sure there would not be rebellion, they would take the people and transplant them into a place that was unfamiliar. That way, the people would be scared enough, and because they did not know their familiar surroundings, they would not rebel. That is pretty smart.
These people came down from near the Euphrates River and settled in Samaria. Lions and wild animals started to attack and kill some of the people. So they said, “Hey, you have got to do something about this. We are getting attacked by lions. Maybe it is the god of this land. We have got to know the ways of the God of this land.”
So they asked for a priest, and a priest was sent down to teach them the law of the Lord. We can say that these people were lion converts. They were afraid of lions, and therefore they turned to the Lord. That is basically their story.
They were from another place, and they did intermarry with the people in Israel who lived there, because only the poor were left. You had this group of people.
When the southern kingdom came back from captivity and started to build the temple, these people said—you can find this in Ezra 4—“Let us help build the temple with you, because after all, we worship the same God.” Zerubbabel said, “No, you are not going to do it,” because they did not think they were worshipers of the same God.
That really upset these people. So they set up their own temple on Mount Gerizim. If you remember Mount Gerizim, Moses had instructed the people concerning Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. On Mount Ebal were the curses, and on Mount Gerizim were the things that led to life.
The Samaritans said, “Okay, you have a temple; we will have a temple,” and they built it on Mount Gerizim. The other thing they had was the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That was basically what they read, and that was how they knew what they did about the Lord.
It is interesting because sometimes the word used for Samaritan can also be used for Sadducee. The Sadducees only used the Pentateuch. They did not believe in spirits, angels, or resurrection. They went back to the Pentateuch, usually only the Pentateuch.
They were called foreigners. They were not fellow citizens as the Jews were, but they were not looked at as illegal aliens either. They were aliens not by their own choice; they were forced to be there. They were like people on a visa. They had their work card and everything, and they were allowed to be there—but that was it.
In Ezra 4 and Nehemiah, we see that the Samaritans were kind of enemies with the Jews who were building the temple and rebuilding Jerusalem. So these are who they are.
What is the situation the Lord is stepping into? Let us read the next few verses, starting with John 4:5:
So He cometh to a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph:
and Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give Me to drink.
For His disciples were gone away into the city to buy food.
Jesus is moving through Samaria. They do not have a bus, a train, or anything like that. They are walking. They do not even have a donkey.
We generally walk about three miles an hour. If you were walking twenty miles in a day, and you started at seven o’clock in the morning, it would take you seven hours. What time would you finish your twenty miles? About two o’clock. I am teaching you some math skills here.
The thing is, they walked long ways. I am not saying they walked twenty miles; they probably walked more. But when they got there, they were weary, and it says it was about the sixth hour.
Some people say that, if this is Hebrew time, it is talking about twelve noon. Others say it is Roman time, about six in the evening. I like to think it is six in the evening, because at twelve o’clock I am not ready to quit walking. But as the sun is going down, I am ready to stop. Plus, that is the time when I get hungry.
They have come all this way, they have stopped, and Jesus sends the disciples to get something. One man I was reading said he believed not all the disciples went to buy food. He believed John stayed, and I think so too. How else would we know about this? I think John was an eyewitness. I think he stood in the background, did not bother them, and was just like a fly on the wall, listening to what was happening.
That is the situation. Jesus has come, and He is weary. This says something about the Lord also. When He came as a man, He came with the limitations of a man. He did not come with some supernatural energy so that He could run twenty thousand marathons and not be tired.
He walked a long way. He was tired. He has been through everything that we have—not just mental things, but physical things. He knew physical exertion. Here we have a man, the Son of God and the Son of Man, who is in every way like we are, except in sin. He is weary, and He comes there and waits by a well.
Now I want to look at the woman. She comes to draw water. What do we know about her?
She came alone. I think this is really odd, because I would think that women of that day had their friends and such. Why did she not come with a group of other women, where they could all talk and share things they were going through, what was happening with their kids, and things like that? But she comes by herself.
Some people say there were two wells by the city of Sychar. One was close to the city, and the other was a little farther away. The one farther away was where she came, while most of the other women went to the other one. Why would she not go where most of the other women went?
We know by reading the chapter that maybe she was not accepted by the other women of the town. Therefore, it was easier to go to a place alone. She would not be bothered. People would not give her the stares and those types of things. But she was alone.
Secondly, she was perceptive. She noticed right away that Jesus was a Jew. She could tell by the way He looked, maybe even by the way He talked. It was a little different from where she was from.
Later on, she says, “I perceive that Thou art a prophet.” She was somewhat perceptive. Even when He asks about water, she says, “You do not even have a pitcher or rope to put down the well.” She was aware of things around her.
I think that is one reason she is at the well: she is aware of what the other ladies think of her, probably what the other people in the town think of her. Her awareness drives her there.
Finally, she had some religious training. First of all, she starts talking about Jacob. She was probably taught by her mother about Jacob and who Jacob was.
When she says, “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship,” she knows there is a difference between the worship of the Jews and the worship of the Samaritans.
She also says, “When the Messiah comes.” How did she know about a Messiah? She must have had some religious training.
Let me tell you this: religious training does not stop us from being sinners. Do you understand that? It might polish the outside, but it does nothing on the inside. It might puff up our heads, but that is about all it does—shine us up on the outside with big heads.
What did Paul say? You might be religious, but does that help you abstain from sin? No, it does not. Matter of fact, some of us who are religious, when we sin, we are really undone, because it puts a mark on us and we cannot get rid of it.
Maybe no one else can see it. It is like “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I am sure none of those officers who came to visit that man heard that heart beating, but the guy who killed him did.
It is the same with us. A lot of you people do not know what I am really like on the inside. You might think, “Well, Jim is okay,” but I will tell you, I do. You can have religious training, but it does not stop you from being a sinner.
Let us look at the conversation. Starting again with John 4:5, Jesus comes to Sychar, sits by Jacob’s well, and says to the woman, “Give Me to drink.”
Right away, we see that the initiator of the conversation is the Lord Jesus Himself. Probably that woman would never have said boo to Him, because that would have been improper for that time and culture. The woman would not have spoken. But He initiates.
He does not ask her a religious question. He does not say, “I know all about you.” He simply asks her a favor: “Could you give Me a drink?” All of a sudden, that opens the door. It opens the door for her to respond.
God always initiates, and He opens the door to respond. Then we can do what we want. But she does respond:
How is it that Thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, who am a Samaritan woman?
Then, parenthetically, it says, “For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.” Well, that is not quite true. Jews did have some dealings with Samaritans. They allowed them to do business with one another. Remember, they were not looked at as unclean or heathen people.
They were allowed to do business, but they were not allowed to share common vessels. If I went to dinner at a Samaritan’s house and they put a plate down, I would have to say, “Sorry, I cannot use that plate. I cannot use your utensils.” Jesus is asking her for a drink of water, and she is saying, “Wait a minute. You are a Jew. You are not supposed to be drinking from what I give.”
She perceives the incongruity of it all—that a Jew would even come to her and ask something of her that Jews do not do. She is a little surprised. Some people say she was saying, “Oh yeah, I know you guys. You think we are unclean until you need something.” I do not think that is her spirit here. It might have been, but I do not think it was. I think she was a little perplexed: “What is this man doing?”
Jesus responds:
If thou knewest the gift of God, and Who it is that saith to thee, Give Me to drink;
thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.
If I were that woman, I would say, “What? What are You talking about?” But she is interested. She wants to say, “What? What are You talking about?” Sometimes, when we are reading the Word, God wants us to act the same way: “What? What are You saying here?”
He says, “If you knew the gift of God.” Interesting. He did not say, “If you knew God.” He said first, “If you knew the gift of God, and Who it is that says to you, ‘Give Me a drink.’” If you really knew, you would say, “I do not need to give You a drink; You give me a drink.”
The woman starts to think. He needs water, and then He says that He can give her water. She answers:
Sir, Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast Thou that living water?
Art Thou greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?
Sometimes wells are fed by a spring at the bottom. If you really wanted to get the living, bubbling water, you would have to put your pitcher all the way down and get it from the bottom. She is wondering about this.
This well, when they found it in the 1830s, was about 150 feet deep. They thought that at one time it was seventy-five feet deep because it had filled in. It was a deep well, so you had to have a lot of rope.
She is asking, “Where? How are You going to get this?” Then she asks, “Are You greater than our father Jacob?” She is starting to think, “Who are You? You said, ‘If you knew Who it was.’ Well, Who are You? Are You greater than Jacob?”
Then Jesus answers:
Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again:
but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst;
but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life.
I am sure she did not understand that. But this woman listened. “What are You saying? What is it? What do You mean, I will never thirst again?”
There is a wonderful song, and I could not find the hymnal because I did not know the first line, but the chorus goes:
What, never thirst again?
No, never thirst again.
What, never thirst again?
No, never thirst again.
That is the thing: what, never thirst again? I am sure she had no idea what He was talking about. Even we sometimes have no idea what the Lord is talking about. We may say, “Oh, well, I know He is talking about the Holy Spirit,” but keep it in the context. She is a Samaritan woman, and He is giving this to her.
She does not understand, because her response is, “Give me this water.” There is a thirst in her life.
We always have something that has to be filled on the outside before we start thinking about the inside. In Maslow, when we took teacher training, we learned that until the basic needs are met, you cannot think of anything beyond them.
Kids who are poor may have trouble learning because they are thinking, “Where am I going to get dinner tonight? It is cold, and I lost my jacket.” They are thinking about those types of things. Once those things are taken care of, then they can think. That is why the government did things like school lunches, so kids could think about school instead of thinking about where they were going to get lunch.
The woman says:
Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come all the way hither to draw.
She is sensing a need, but she is still not on the same page. She is thinking, “I will not have to come to this well to draw water anymore.”
The Lord says, “Go, call thy husband, and come hither.” People have a field day with this. Some say the Lord is just setting her up. Others say He thinks maybe she does not have enough upstairs and her husband can help her. The thing is, He asked the question. It is not for us to try to decide why He asked. The thing is, He asked the question.
She responds simply, “I have no husband.” The Lord knows her, and He says, “You are right, you do not.”
Thou saidst well, I have no husband:
for thou hast had five husbands;
and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: this hast thou said truly.
All of a sudden, she is uncovered before Him. No one else is around. Remember, she is alone, and He uncovers her there.
Brothers and sisters, I think that is a wonderful piece of grace. When the Lord is dealing with you, He does not make public spectacles, unless there is religious bigotry or self-righteousness. Look at how He dealt with the Pharisees.
Here you have a woman whose life—we do not know whether she had been divorced or whether her husbands had died—but we know she is living with someone and it is not in wedlock. We know that, at least from that, morally she is not in tune with what God would have for her. Yet the Lord uncovers her graciously.
Now she says:
Sir, I perceive that Thou art a prophet.
Our fathers worshiped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
Some people say she is trying to get the light off herself: “Let us forget about my sin and talk about a religious problem.” Others say Jesus has opened up a longing in her, and all of a sudden it comes into her saying, “If there is a God, how do I worship Him? Where do I worship Him? I want to know.”
Jesus says:
Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father.
Ye worship that which ye know not: we worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews.
But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth:
for such doth the Father seek to be His worshippers.
God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.
Put this in the context. She comes asking, “Where do you worship?” Jesus has just come up from Jerusalem. He has seen the worship there—the ritual worship, the prayers being offered, and everything.
He is saying, really, it is not a matter of right form. Worship is not a matter of right form or right place. If we are Christians, we do not only come to this place to worship. This is not the only place, because it is not about form or place.
Then He says, “In truth.” The Samaritans did not have the whole truth, and her knowledge of God was lacking. He is saying that it is not in the place, but it has to be right. It has to be with the right knowledge of Who God is.
He is saying the time for it being in a place is now going, and the time for knowing Who God really is is now here. God is searching for those who are saying, “Lord, I come to this place, and I want to find You. I do not want to just come to this place; I want to find You.”
Worship is about Him. It is all about Him.
The woman says:
I know that Messiah cometh (He that is called Christ):
when He is come, He will declare unto us all things.
Then Jesus says:
I that speak unto thee am He.
Boy, He really came out and said that. He was very upfront with her and said, “I am here.” He never said that to the Pharisees until they captured Him and brought Him before Caiaphas: “Art Thou the Christ, the Son of the living God?” “I am.”
But here, in John 4, to a Samaritan woman, He comes right out and says Who He is. He did not even say this to Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.
Let us pick up in John 4:27:
And upon this came His disciples; and they marvelled that He was speaking with a woman;
yet no man said, What seekest Thou? or, Why speakest Thou with her?
Rabbis were not supposed to converse with women, especially alone. Never were they supposed to converse with them about the law. But nobody said, “What is she doing here? Why are You talking to her?”
Then the woman left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men:
Come, see a Man, Who told me all things that ever I did: can this be the Christ?
Did she ever give Jesus a drink of water? We do not know. Some people say no, that they just got caught up in the conversation, and then she left her waterpot. Some people say she left it so He could have a drink from it.
I think she was just flabbergasted with what she had heard. She goes, and she does not hide it in her heart. She blurts it out to the people in the city. She goes to the gates of the city and says, “This Man has told me everything I have ever done.”
All of a sudden, they are hooked by this. It says:
They went out of the city, and were coming to Him.
In the meantime, His disciples urged Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” He said to them:
I have meat to eat that ye know not.
Therefore the disciples said to one another, “Hath any man brought Him aught to eat?” Maybe John snuck Him something.
Jesus says:
My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to accomplish His work.
Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest?
behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, that they are white already unto harvest.
Some people say that, as He is saying this, the men from the Samaritan city of Sychar are coming up the hill, and He is pointing them out.
He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal;
that he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together.
For herein is the saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth.
I sent you to reap that whereon ye have not labored:
others have labored, and ye are entered into their labor.
He has a discussion with His disciples that is going to be very prophetic, because it talks about their ministry later on.
Then it says:
And from that city many of the Samaritans believed on Him because of the word of the woman, who testified, He told me all things that ever I did.
So when the Samaritans came unto Him, they besought Him to abide with them: and He abode there two days.
And many more believed because of His word;
and they said to the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy speaking:
for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.
As a result of this conversation, there is a harvest. The harvest is that these Samaritans in this city believe.
There is another time in Luke when Jesus sets His face toward Jerusalem and wants to go through Samaria. Another group of Samaritans says, “You are not passing through here because You are going to Jerusalem.” But I do not think those were the people in this town.
How does this all apply to us? Here is our application:
If thou knewest the gift of God, and Who it is that saith to thee, Give Me to drink;
thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.
“If you knew the gift of God.” Here is where we get mixed up. It is not, “If you knew of the gift of God.” We have a tendency to say that if we know about something, that is as good as knowing it. That is not true.
If you knew the gift of God—what is the gift of God? Some of us will say, “Well, the forgiveness of our sins,” and I am going to say, “No.” It is more than that.
I was an athlete in my time, and some of you who were athletes had coaches. Did you ever hear the statement, “You have got to go to the well, kid”? Nobody in here? I thought there was at least one athlete in here besides me.
“Go to the well.” You have got to dig deep. What they are trying to do is get you to go inside yourself and bring something up that will help you get through something. That is exactly what it is: they are looking for you, out of your natural self, to do something.
We get forgiveness of sins, and then we think the next thing the Lord does is give us a bucket and a rope and say, “Dig deep.” But that is not what it is all about.
To get water out of a well, I have to use my own strength. I had better have enough rope, and I had better have the strength to pull it up. Good thing that lady has a pulley. Maybe that pulley is the Holy Spirit. No, it is not. It is a man-made device to help me out.
Oh boy, we have so many self-helps. You go into any bookstore: self-help stuff, how to do things on your own, how to do things yourself. Self, self, self.
The only thing the Lord ever says about self is, “Deny yourself.”
We think the gift of God is that we have this water down there, and it is up to us to dredge it up. But these wells are filled seasonally. They get more water if it rains or floods, but if there is a drought, what happens? The well dries up.
How many of us have known that our wells have dried up, or that our wells have slim pickings, and we go to the Lord and ask for a little more water so we can dredge it out again?
But the Lord’s gift is this: an artesian well. Jesus said the water He gives is a source. It is a source. You do not bring it up. “I put it in you.”
Remember when we did the series on the fundamentals: Christ in you? The gift of God is life—