Join Nathan Oliver as he delves into John chapter 4—the story of Jesus and the woman at the well—to explore a faith that truly impacts our daily lives. Discover how faith is thinking, deeply personal, and actively lived out. If you're seeking a faith that goes beyond Sunday and meets you where you are, this message offers refreshing insights.
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We are a welcoming and growing multigenerational church in Doncaster East in Melbourne with refreshing faith in Jesus Christ. We think that looks like being life-giving to the believer, surprising to the world, and strengthening to the weary and doubting.
Transcription
Bible Reading: John 4:4-45
This morning's reading is taken from the Gospel of John, beginning at verse chapter four, verse four.
Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Saco, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 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. 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. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asked you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. 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? 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 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. 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. Sir, the woman said, I can see you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain. But the Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. 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 woman said, I know that the Messiah called Christ is coming. When he comes, we will explain everything to us. Then Jesus said, I, the one speaking to you, I am he. Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, what do you want? Or why are you talking with her? When leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah? They came out of the town and made their way toward him. Meanwhile, his disciples urged him, Rabbi, eat something. But he said to them, I have food to eat that you know nothing about. Then his disciples said to each other, could someone have brought him food? My food, said Jesus, is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don't you have a saying? It's still four months until harvest, I tell you. Open your eyes and look at the fields. They are ripe for the harvest. Even now, the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life. So that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying one sows and another reaps is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work and you have reaped the benefits of their labor. Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony. He told me everything I ever did. So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them. And he stayed two days. And because of this words, many more became believers. They said to the woman, we no longer believe just because of what you said. Now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.
This is the Word of God.
Opening Remarks
Happy Mother's Day, I suppose. I don't know if that's a good introduction. It's too much of me. That's the first thing. But, And I'm here again.
You know, Amy said a quiet life, not on a stage. I'm sorry about that. Thank you. That was. Pedram, you made us look way better than we are. That was good. I'm proud of Amy. and I love hearing her share her heart, too. So it's good.
And, you know, before I begin, I'm going to pray. Father, thank you for your Grace. And free love. I love that line. That, you are greater. then, then our failures. So, God, I pray now that we would see your goodness this morning by your Holy Spirit. Would you make that clear to us? In your name we pray. Amen.
So, Yeah. Like, I don't know how many people, would have known us before the video on the screen just now. we have been part of Deep Creek for about 12 months or so. you might know us. You might know us as, the family with the noisiest baby. Or you might know us as the family that's always late. which is fair. I didn't know there was music at the start until today. So this is the earliest we've turned up on a Sunday, so it was a good habit for us to begin. It's good. it's really good to be here and a good opportunity. Thank you for having me share with you this morning.
My background is in church leadership, and, but it's been a couple of years since I've preached the until 8:00 this morning, and it was okay. so, you know, appreciate you, Grace and me having lots of nerves. I'm more nervous after the video than I was before. but I'm also nervous just just through the week. Thinking about this passage. I appreciate the Bible reading this morning. That was a long one. I'm sorry. and we're not going to go through it verse by verse if you wanted, though. open a Bible or have it in front of you. The text is going to jump around a little bit. but I'm nervous because, thinking about this passage and just actually applying it to my own heart. It's a big thing. there's a lot. There's a lot for us to think about.
We're talking about everyday faith and how our faith makes a difference for us on the daily. Right. That's a big thing. And I think in my reflections this week, I'm feeling that very personally. And there's a there's a bunch that we can take out from this interaction that Jesus has, with the woman at the well.
And so, what I want to look at, are three things about, I think, what this lady learned and definitely what we can learn about faith in everyday life. I want to look at how, our faith is a thinking faith, a personal faith and an act of faith.
Just also want to clarify that when I. When I say faith, I mean faith in God. We're going to shorthand that today. we often in today's day and age, we talk about faith quite broad and quite generally, faith can mean that I just have general hope. have faith in myself. I have faith that we can get through. But definitely what we're talking about this morning is faith in everyday life is faith in God. The difference that he makes when we put our hope and trust in him?
Okay, so thinking faith, personal faith and living faith.
Faith in God is a Thinking Faith
So the first one. Faith in God is a thinking faith. Okay, now, we read the passage, and one of the things that you'll notice at the start, or maybe I'll give words to you for that is there's six verses of context, six, six verses, just to set the story up. Now, the reason that's interesting to me is because you don't get that in every passage. I wish we did, but we don't. Often you'll get maybe one line, maybe one word, maybe just a really brief intro to what's happening. Maybe sometimes there's none. But here we get six whole verses on context, and so we need to learn from that and take well, the setting actually must be quite important. And it is. We need to know that the setting is significant to the people of Samaria. This is a Samaritan woman at the well. The setting where they are in Samaria is important.
I like the way that the the passage was read this morning for us. It said Jesus had to go through this place, and it's sort of like, well, why else would he if he didn't have to? He probably wouldn't. And that's the case. Jews and Samaritans were not the best of friends. This was a time where where you came from determined significantly. What you believed today might not be that different, but it was very much the case in this time. Judea and sorry, Judea and Samaria were at this stage politically the same. They were both under the same Roman rule, technically within the same sort of like, country, I suppose. But historically, Samaria stood out. If you go back to one Kings, you'll see that there was a point in Israel's history where Samaria was made the capital of the northern Kingdom. Why that's significant is because when the Assyrian empire came in and took over Israel, they went for Samaria. They went for that city. It was strategically the smartest thing to do. And one of the ways that they defeated that city was to take all of the prominent Israelites out of it and put their own people in. Right. And so the people who influenced culture the most were now gone, and it was mixed in with the new Assyrian flavor. It became this sort of dual culture. And they changed. They mingled everything. They, they, they, they shared each other. They learned new recipes from each other and their background and their cultures. They they whatever. They watched each other's movies. I don't know how you learn someone else's culture, but they they sort of mixed everything up, including intermarrying and including borrowing from each other's religious perspective. So much so that Samaria kind of adapted this alt alt alternative version of the Hebrew faith. It's it's alt Jew Judaism, that's what it is. And, They sort of during this phase, they sort of like only focused in on the first five books of the Bible of the law. That's how they interpreted everything in Samaria. And so, the Jews actually had a further breadth to draw from, to understand God's Word, but it was just reduced. And because it was reduced to those five chapters or, sorry, five books of the Bible, the literal implications of that meant that they thought that the place where you worshiped God was in this specific setting on Mount Gerizim. And it was so important to them that they actually built a rival temple there. And that's. Does that make sense? Now, as you think about the conversation Jesus was having with this woman. And and he's saying, you believe this. And she's saying, well, we believe this. And you. And what about where you worship, right? That's why it's because of this, this background.
And it was such a rivalry that was built between the two 200 years after that temple was built. There was an uprising by certain, Jewish people, and they destroyed their temple, the Samaritan temple. And that was 200 years before this story took place. This is a rivalry that is both historical and religious, and it's centered at the location where we're reading this story. Add something to the text. It adds something. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus finds himself there, and there's no one else there except this one lady, the Samaritan woman. And here we have a Jew and a Samaritan, and they begin to talk.
If you need further confirmation of the rivalry, just look at verse nine where it says, the Samaritan woman said to him, You're a Jew. I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? And here it is, just there for you. For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Clear as day. And yet they did associate. And it doesn't seem heated either. There is a reasonable exchange. And in the end, the woman Jesus is speaking with seemingly expresses faith in God the way that Jesus was talking about it. And by the end of the passage, we see she's a believer. Through this conversation. This is a powerful conversation. A reasonable exchange of thoughts and ideas took place, and it led to something very significant happening.
It's not a normal conversation because Jesus uses all sorts of vivid imagery about water and, you know, water that doesn't run out. It's very metaphorical, right? I don't know. I don't know if you would if you would find that frustrating or not. Talking with someone who's speaking in metaphors and hey, the wind is a bit of, I don't know, I don't even want to pretend like I can do that. But she doesn't know what Jesus means. But that's kind of the point. He says something, she clarifies. Jesus doubles down on his claims. She questions, how does that fit with my beliefs? Even the part Jesus miraculously knows her family history. She changes the topic and Jesus lets her, doesn't pull it back and say no, no, no, no. It's a very even conversation. Jesus gives room for the penny to drop. Because, you know, she needs to think this through. Even when the location question is brought up in verse 20, she says, but what about where you worship and where we worship? It's different. Jesus says, believe me. A time is coming when you will worship the father, neither on this mountain or in Jerusalem. A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the father in 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. In other words, Jesus says to her, where? Think about it. Think about it. Think about who God is and what he's like. Maybe think about how big he is, how great he is. Do you really think he cares which side of the hill you worship on? There is a coming time where none of that will matter. Not from your side or from my side. No, no, no. He cares about your heart.
And you might say, well, why bother with all of that, right? We saw in the passage there was a moment he pulled the husband trick out, and he. And like, that was pretty impressive. Like like he pulled out the thing. He had no knowledge of that beforehand. He just says it like, why bother with all the interaction? Just do that again. She was on the ropes. Get her over the line now. Right. You could even say, why are we even reading this at all? If Jesus is like this, that people like do the the miracle trick on me, you know, and I'll believe 100% no gaps at all. Right? And the reason why he doesn't just zap us into faith is because faith requires thinking. I don't think you can have faith without thinking. Is that good news for you this morning? You can't have faith without thinking. Which I think that's good news, because I think there is a perception out there that Christians are people who have switched their brains off, and the people who think would never believe what we believe or what a Christian believes. But I don't think it can work like that to have faith in God who we can't see. We have to acknowledge that you can't prove God's existence, and at the same time, you can't disprove his existence either. So that puts the whole thing in a bit of a dilemma. Either side of that equation, you are going to have to stand on faith one way or the other. I do believe it or I don't believe it. Both are faith standpoints. You can't prove it either way. So the question becomes you have to what? What can you live with from that position of faith that you take? Whichever one is what has the least issues for you? And so you have to think about that. What am I content to live with? One person says God can't be real because there's so much pain and suffering. Another person says the pain and suffering led me to God. Do you see what I'm saying?
This week, as I was hanging out with a friend at the pub, we were talking about politics because I'm a boring person now and have grown up conversations. We were talking about politics and everything that's wrong in the world. And he got really agitated about one specific thing. I'm not going to say it's too divisive. Don't even ask me about it. but, it was. Are you Team Naga or Brookie? Which one? And we said, I'm not going to go into it. No no, no. Three people are on social media. Okay, okay. No no, no, it was something else more global than that. And, and he he was super agitated. Right. And I was thinking to myself, how do I even help my friend? What's my role here? And so I had this strange idea to ask him a question. Okay, that's fair enough. I agree with you. It's bad. But where do you get peace from now? But what will bring you peace? How are you going to live with that? And what I really want to say was, because if you intellectualize issues and push them aside because they're too much, then you have to acknowledge that the only way to do that by is by faith that nothing matters ultimately. If if you intellectualize it and then say, well, I can't deal with it, I just have to push it aside. Well, then the only way to do that, really is the faith that nothing really matters in the end. But it does matter to my friend. It does, obviously it does.
See, faith comes from thinking, and thinking leads to faith. Don't just leave it there. Think. Be a thoughtful person. Think. Think about what? Why is it that when you see a beautiful sunset, it does something in you? But why? Why so much art based on the things around the world that we would describe as beautiful? Why do photographers take pictures of things that's done? Why? Why do we like it when we see it? Think about these things. What is it? And then what's the next question after that? You got to think. Remember Jesus on the road to Emmaus talking with the disciples. And he said, guys, remember, this is what the Bible said, this and this and this. Put it together. Think about it. Remember Jesus when he taught on worry and he's lying to the people he was speaking to. He was you of little faith. Why? Because. Just think about it. Look at the lilies of the field. Look at the sparrows. They eat their feel right. Don't worry. Think about that. Think this faith is a thinking faith. Faith in God requires thinking.
Faith in God is also Personal
Faith in God is also personal. We need to accept faith in God, which means we need to let it in. Sometimes that's hard because the personal stuff we feel can run pretty deep and it's real stuff. And actually, that's what I want to talk about, the real stuff, where it is personal.
It was very personal for this lady, at least in three ways. She had three. She she had she had hurdles to get over. Firstly, she was a Samaritan. Secondly, she was female. And thirdly, she had a personal history that was difficult.
The fact that she's a Samaritan, I've already covered a bunch of that. It wasn't just a racial division, it was a religious division. Certain associations with the Samaritan would have made a Jew ritually unclean. In fact, the verse is in so verse nine where it says, For Jews don't associate with Samaritans. The Greek is a bit dubious there, and is often used to sort of like translate a different way, which would say for Jews and Samaritans don't share, don't share the same dish. Right. And yet Jesus pursues her. He jumps that hurdle.
Secondly, she's female. Everything of note in regard to a Samaritan background of the woman would be intensified by the fact of her being female. There's a bit of a pause in the story when the disciples catch up with Jesus and see him chatting with a woman, right? Remember that bit at the end? And I think it says they were surprised. Huh? What are you doing? Jesus is you at a lady? And it says. But no one said anything. The implication being, normally they might write. She wasn't supposed to be chatting with him. In fact, there was a traditional law created in the oral tradition that declared all Samaritan women were unclean from birth. It just really shouldn't have been doing this. And yet, if you flick back just one chapter to John three, you know, for God so loved the world that he gave. Right? That and this chapter are eerily similar. It's Jesus speaking with one person, having a deep and meaningful about all the big things of life. Except in that instance, it was a man, a powerful, educated, religious Jewish man. And he treats what's what. What is so stark about the two passages is he treats them both identically. Jesus shows this lady the same dignity and respect as anyone else. He jumps that hurdle.
And then it's the private life that Jesus is talking about needs. Using water as a metaphor, anyone who would drink the water that I could offer them, they'll never be thirsty again. And she hasn't really got it right. And so Jesus changes the topic and addresses something in her life. Go tell your husband. Go tell your husband. Which she says, well, I don't have a husband. Jesus knew that. But what she said wasn't entirely true. Jesus clarifies that he knew that too. Now, it's not the whole picture. You've had five husbands. The man you're with now currently is not your husband. And yet, here's the key. Jesus doesn't rub it in her face. He commends her honest answer. And then he reveals the full story. There's no doubt this woman would have experienced stigma in her day. And at no point does Jesus embarrass her. Tease her. Mock her. Look down on her. And neither does he condone her situation. But he doesn't treat her unfairly. Instead, the offer to her is the same to you. And I have faith in God from exactly where you are, exactly where you are.
I don't know about you, but like, so often I think I'm like, in order to even have faith in God, I'm supposed to be at a certain standard, even when I pray. I'm not honest all the time because I'm. And I pretend like like God. Like I could schmooze him over to think that I'm actually worthy. You know what I'm saying? Do you relate to that at all? But it's it's the gaps in our life that are that show us where we need God. It's personal, it's deep, it's real. But it has to come from those gaps.
I've been getting into, becoming cultured in the last couple of years and learning about art history. I'm grown up now, and I can have conversations with other grown ups, too. And so I'm just I just want to impress people that I know stuff about art. That's all it really is. No, but I find it fascinating. I've loved this guy's writing called Russ Ramsey. he tells the most beautiful stories about famous, art, events throughout history. Right. And as I was reading the passage this week, it made me think of one particular story about Van Gogh. van Gogh. here he is. Vincent van Gogh. People would know him mainly for two things. The starry night painting. And let me test the second thing. How else? What's famous about Van Gogh? It's not. He cut his ear off. All right. There you go. It's exactly what I thought. So that's true, except the lead up to the event where he cut his ear off. Lots of people don't know that. And it's pretty, pretty powerful, actually. maybe you be the judge. Anyway.
so the reason that came to be. Let me tell you the story. Right? It's a true story. Van Gogh was desperate as an artist to be in community with other people. he was he was a very, passionate guy, I suppose is a good way of saying it. And he was desperate to be in a community of artists and, always wanted to, like, do art and better himself, become the greatest artist he could ever be. Right? never really had it. Never really found that community. his brother was an art dealer. And so through the work that he did, he connected with some other artists, including, Paul Gauguin, who was like someone that Van Gogh looked up to. Right. And so, through that connection with his brother, they actually got to know each other a little bit, and he slipped the invitation and say, would you ever consider coming and living in France with me? Go again? After some deliberation, said I will on a trial period. Right. But we won't know each other. We don't know each other. How are we going to get to know each other? We can't find each other on Facebook yet, so I don't even know what you look like, right? So through their letter exchanges, they said, well, let's paint a self-portrait of ourselves as a way of introduction and mail it in the mail. I like this better than social media. And and then they said, how about we also attach like, like a literary thing, like a, like expression to it so that we can get each other where we're at. Right? And so they did. and so can we have the next slide up.
This is Gauguin painted a picture of himself. He painted himself in the image like he presented himself as Jean Valjean from, Les Mis. Which I think is pretty bold. so he's a hero. He's what he's saying, right? And this is what he wrote in the letter. It is the face of an outlaw, ill clad and powerful, like Jean Valjean. That's fun to say. With an inner nobility and gentleness. The faces flush, the eyes accented, and the surrounding colors of a furnace fire. This is to represent the volcanic flames that animate the soul of the artist. The girlish background, with its childlike flowers, is there to attest to our artistic purity. As for this Jean Valjean, whom society has oppressed, cast out, is he not equally the symbol of contemporary Impressionist painters and endowing him with my features? I offer you as well an image of myself, a portrait of all the wretched victims of society. So he writes and says, I'm a hero. I'm representing all the all the outcasts out there and. And that's that's why I do what I do. Van Gogh presented himself in the sort of like nature of a Japanese monk. Right. He was really influenced by Japanese culture. He loved that. You'veseen some of his famous paintings. You can see that. and, so he got his idea from the, you know, the book that became Madame Butterfly, right? The opera, which is about French soldiers stationed off the coast of Japan. He was, you know, sort of like that. He was into that. And this is what he wrote in his letter. If we study Japanese art, we see a man who's undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what he studies a single blade of grass, but the blade of grass leads him to draw every plant. And then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. Come now. Isn't it almost a true religion which these simple Japanese people teach us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers?
Now, here's the thing. Like, he's he's like none of these. Neither of the guys were like, what? They said they were right. They weren't. Came from a super broken. He'd just been kicked out by his family. He couldn't make any money. He was a failed stockbroker, and he really just needed a place to live. And he cast himself as his hero. And then, like, sorry, it's troubling history of Van Gogh, but he was he was a troubled man. He was deeply anxious. Deeply. He struggled with self-doubt significantly. And yet they present each other as like, hey, this is this. It sounds like it's going to be a great community. And they did produce some good work, but they could only stick it out for 63 days. They argued bitterly every day. They were so like they had such different views. And so. And it actually ended in one boozy beef up one night when they were drinking in a cafe, discussing where art should come from in the artist's eyes. Right. And it says, the cafe owner said, like Van Gogh threw his absinthe across the room, and then he went up to his apartment. He got a razor to come back, and his intention was to kill Gauguin. He got a few steps away from him and then freaked out when Gauguin turned around and he just ran off and he ran up to his apartment, which is where the next thing he did was cut his ear off. What a tragic tale. What? What a tragic story.
And the thing is about that Russ Ramsey, who I mentioned before, who writes about these things, what he says in this particular section is that to truly know someone. To truly know someone is to know their pain, is to know the gaps in their life, to know their area of need. That's how you know someone, not by their aspirational self, but by their actual self, when maybe even no one's looking. And then he points out that when you look at Jesus's ministry, that's in fact how you know anyone that Jesus related to. Think about all the people that Jesus ministered to. That we know them by their deficit. That's how we know them. Blind Bartimaeus. We know that the woman who was bleeding, we know the child who, like, was only sleeping like, you know what I'm saying? Like everyone that Jesus ministered to. It was at the point of need. It was the gaps in their life that actually made Jesus good news for them.
And look at what Jesus is saying in this passage, verse 13 and 14. It says, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I given will be coming them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The gaps in your life, in other words, the things you ache for, the things that have hurt you, the things that make you broken, the things that put you at a distance from God do not preclude you from faith in God. In fact, it's the opposite. The prerequisite for faith is thirst. Jesus isn't saying it's bad to want things, or to desire things, or to to be broken or anything like that. He's saying that if you put your faith in those things, though, that if only my job was better, if only I had more money, if only I had if whatever. Your if only statement is that if you put your faith in those things, you will be left wanting. There is nothing big enough to contain the dreams of your heart, the daily lives that you live. There is nothing big enough to contain it other than the one who made you. That's what he's saying. Because he knows he's the only one he can hold us. Our hopes and dreams, our hearts hurts and our fears. He's the only one big enough who can handle that. He's the only one. Therefore, he's the only one who we could really, truly have faith in that can meet us where we're at.
Do you see Jesus at the cross and what he's doing? He he goes to the cross for our sin, right? And he pays the penalty. He gets rid of the gap between us and God. The things that cause the hurt, the things that cause the act. He he deals with that. But do you notice what happens that kind of like the climactic moment, the moment where Jesus breathed his last, everything goes black. And then what happened in the temple? The holy place, the place where God resided. The place where he dwelt, the place that was the most special dwelling of him in earth at all, was protected by a thick curtain. And at the moment Jesus died and passed cross that thorn for us. It tore into, because nothing could keep his holiness away from our own holiness. Nothing could keep his love away from us. And so he says, no, it's not. You show me how good you are and then you earn it. I'm coming to you in love so that you can respond to me in faith. It's your thirst for all things is the prerequisite for faith in Jesus. And in doing these things, Jesus validates those aches. He validates the hurts. He validates the gaps in your life and says, yes, it was intended to be different. And one day all those things will be realized in him.
If faith is not personal, I don't think it's worth it. So, friends, I ask you in love today. Where are the gaps in your life? These are the spaces where God wants to have wants us to have hope and trust and faith in him. This is what this is the conversation he's having at the well with this woman. And he is the very gift himself that he offers for it to happen. It's good news. So where are the gaps in your life? These are the spaces where our faith comes from, needs to come from, not the bits where you got to work out.
Faith in God is a Living Faith
The third thing leads from that, and it's that faith in God is a living faith. Once we have faith in God, then what? I'm going to be short here, so don't worry. So it's going along well. Let's look at the woman at the well. Can we read verse 28 to 30? It's like she hears and then she goes. She receives that. She leaves her jar there. People like talk symbolically like that. She's she's given up her mechanism to keep drawing from the physical water because she's received from Jesus. I don't know if that's what is actually going on or not. She just might have forgotten a jar, I don't know, but either way, like, she's gone and she's like, she's acting. She's like and telling people, guys, you'll never believe I just spoke to this. Man. He knew everything. He's. He's got to be the one. He's got to be. She did something. She acted.
I love it, I love it how it says at the end. We no longer believe just because of what you said. Now we have heard for ourselves. You see, they're going through the process. We're thinking. We're applying it to ourselves. And now we believe. And so now we are in response. Yeah.
There's two ways you need to respond to God in faith. If you believe it's true. Faith. I've been thinking about what faith is and you can sum it up as belief. You can sum it up as just what you think. I don't know, but one thing I think the Bible describes faith as is responding to what you know is true about who God is. Right. Which then helps us identify how we need to have faith in him. What do you know is true about God? Do you know that God is the most generous being in all the universe? Well, then, what does that say about how you use your resources, your finances, your time, your energy, keeping to yourself? Like, how could you if you know what God's like? What about how God welcomes strangers? Well, then who gets to eat at your table? How many times? This is for me too. How many times do people get to sit at your table who don't share the same surname as you? What does it mean to make new friends? Isn't that what God's like? I'm not saying you have to do it that way. But what do you know about God to be true? And then how do you live? What about that? That he will return one day to judge the living and the dead? Okay, so where do you cut corners? What are the small gaps in your life that you can offer to him in faith and trust him in those spaces?
The second thing that we can see here is that faith is for ourselves to to live out. But then it's for the benefit of others, too. That's what happened. A whole community of people came to faith in Jesus because one woman responded.
In my role, I raised money for churches during the week. That's what I do. and it means I get to go and speak with lots of wonderful people. And I had a meeting not long ago with, with a big, foundation that is not from a Christian or any sort of religious background, and they'd never worked with an organization that was a faith organization. And I didn't know that until we met. And but I just approached it the same way I normally would. and so we just met for coffee and had a really good time, and it was just lovely. It was so, so much fun. And we kind of got carried away and just having a good time having coffee together. That's sort of my life. But, And then she sort of caught herself unnoticed. She caught herself and went, oh yeah, I've got to ask that question. And she, I could tell, like her face dropped a bit and she said it was like she had this important question that she needed to check before we passed the test, you know, and she said, but what do you say about the fact that, churches already have loads of money, that churches are rich? I said, you should see my church. No, I said, that joke worked better this morning. and I said, well, yeah, institutionally, I can see that's true. But the reality is, every church that I know, they're in it because they believe it and nothing else, that they're writing off their own steam. They're pushing as hard as they can with every resource that they've got. And I just had happened to have come from a meeting where I met with someone who was leading a church, and in their congregation, they told me that there's a number of instances, serious instances, and one of them was domestic violence. And so he had actually invited a woman to come live with his family. And that's what had happened. And so I relayed that to this person. I said he's not doing it because he has to. This is out of hours work. He believes this is what to do. This is how to live by faith, because this is the way that God has treated him. And then it looks like that. And she said, I need to figure out how I can tell this to the people at my work, because we need to figure out how to make that more common. And then she indicated that she wanted to just to talk more about how this was real. Do you see? Do you see how it works? Faith that you think through then becomes real for you personally and you live out is compelling. It's beautiful. It's just like the good news that Jesus shared with us.
Would you consider what it might look like to be a person of faith in God? And what that would look like for your life? Think it through. Personalize it. Let it get in the gaps and then live it.
Concluding Prayer
Let me pray. Father God, thank you for your grace. May we live humbly in response to it. Amen.
