Monday, April 2, 2012

Monday, April 2nd

Today's passage from the Chronological Bible In a Year Reading Plan is Judges 8-9
Today's scripture focus is John 4:1-26

1 The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, 2 although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. 3 When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
 4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
 7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
 9 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.)
 10 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.”
 11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”
 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
 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 worshiped 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 worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers 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.”


I skimmed through a sermon by John MacArthur on this passage and some of his points really jumped out at me.

First that this is not an account of the conversion of the Samaritan woman.  This is a story of the unfolding of the revelation about Jesus Christ, and the Samaritan woman just happened to be there.  The story is Christ. The glory is God's.  Always.

in this account, we see Him dealing in love with a woman that no one else could deal with in love because she was a total outcast. And yet that was no problem to Christ because His love wasn't determined by the object, it was determined by the character of His love. (emphasis mine)

Isn't that beautiful?! 


Jesus purposefully went through Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee, even though Israelites always detoured around it, because this meeting was purposeful.

He throughout the day and arrived at Jacob's well and he was tired, hot and thirsty - because even though He was fully God, He was also fully man.  Put He was where God wanted Him to go, when He wanted Him to be there, and when He arrived, He sat down.

Here's an ouch moment for me (emphasis mine).....
that's what God wants out of every believer, to be God's man in God's place at God's time with a mind to do God's will. And you know what? Most of us want to be where we want to be when we want to be there with a mind to do what we want to do. And few Christians are sensitized to the Spirit of God to sense the prodding of the Spirit of God to be somewhere when God wants them to be there to do what God wants them to do.....Most of us are so plugged with our own life, just from one end to the other, jammed into a mold that if God stood on the edge of heaven and hollered at us, I doubt that we could hear. Just to be available to God's Spirit, to be His man in His place at His time with a mind to do His will.

Do you even think like that? Or do you classify everything you do in terms of what you want to do so that if the Spirit of God tries to get in you feel it's an intrusion?

Jesus is where God wants Him, and when He begins to speak to the Samaritan woman she can't believe it - because she is a female, because she is a Samaritan, and because she is an outcast (while He is a prophet).  And not only does He speak to her, He's willing to share her drinking vessel!

And throughout their conversation, she first sees her need for living water, but she also needs to see that her sin is what is keeping her from the Living Water, and then she needs to see that Jesus IS the Living Water.  Sinners don't need ritual, they don't need religion, they need forgiveness.  And forgiveness comes from no one but Jesus Christ.

This is the Messiah.  This is the Christ.  What will you do with Him?

1 comment:

Miriam said...

"His love wasn't determined by the object, it was determined by the character of His love."

That is beautiful!