Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text is found in John chapter 4 reading from verse 1 to verse 26 this week. John 4:1–26. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. John 4 beginning at verse 1.

When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, though Jesus himself baptized not but his disciples, he left Judea and departed again into Galilee. And he must needs go through Samaria.

Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychem, next to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore being wearied with his journey, sat on the well. And it was about the sixth hour. There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said unto her, “Give me to drink, for his disciples were gone away into the city to buy meat.” Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, “How is it that thou, being a Jew, ask drink of me, which I am a woman of Samaria?” For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.

Jesus answered and said unto her, 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. The woman saith unto him, 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, which gave us this well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?

Jesus answered, and saith unto her, Whosoever 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 be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw. Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither.

The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus saith unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband, for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband. And that sayest thou truly. The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, “Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father.

Ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The woman saith unto him, I know that Messiah cometh, which is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things.

Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for this text of scripture. We pray Lord God that you would help us to understand it to the end that we might obey the commandments in it, that we might know ourselves better—who we are in our fallen nature and who we are in our recreated state that the Lord Jesus Christ has brought us to through his work. Help us father to rejoice in who you are and who you reveal yourself to be, and to be transformed at the center of our being into those that reflect your image in the context of our lives. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

There was a press release this week or the last couple of weeks that was circulated around in various list serves and email lists, one of which I’m on called Biblical Horizons. And I didn’t read the press release really, but it was about how Christianity was in a tremendous state of decline in England to almost vanishing. Christianity had gone to the dogs, so to speak, in the context of this press release.

Well, one of the men on this Biblical Horizons list that I’m on said that this press account reminded him of a statement from G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton said that five times throughout history, Christianity has gone to the dogs and all five times it was the dogs that died.

We see in our account today in John Chapter 4, Christianity and the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ going to the dogs, going to the Samaritans. And we understand this a little better if we know our Old Testament history about Samaria. But understand once more, as I said last week, that the Samaritans were worse than Gentiles to the Jews. There was tremendous, you know, a wall of division between the Jews and the Samaritans. The Samaritans were kind of a half-breed syncretist—they mixed their worship of Yahweh with other groups. Samaria was originally built by Omri in the Old Testament.

Kids, that’s your answer number four on your children’s outline, by the way. Omri’s son was Ahab, and Omri arranged probably the marriage between Ahab and Jezebel in the Old Testament. So we know how bad Ahab and Jezebel were. Ahab built an altar to Baal at Samaria. You have the tremendous associations that were just awful in the context of the Old Testament. When Ezekiel gets around to describing the harlotries and prostitutions of the north and the south—northern Israel and southern Israel, Israel and Judah, so-called in the Old Testament—you know, we have these lines of kings in Israel and in Judah that after Solomon, his son Rehoboam blows it, so he gets the south and Jeroboam is given the north.

Quickly goes into idolatry. And in the context of that, when Ezekiel finally gets around to talking about the great idolatries and adulteries, so to speak, of the north and the south, he talks about Samaria in the north and Jerusalem in the south. So Samaria is pictured by Ezekiel as a prostitute, and in a text from Ezekiel she is described that way. And so Samaria always had this horrific reputation.

By the way, when we get then to this woman of Samaria who comes to the well in the middle of the day—who has had five husbands and living with a sixth guy that’s not a husband—we’re immediately, if we know our Old Testament and Ezekiel’s descriptions, seeing that she is a picture, so to speak, of Samaria itself. She’s not a prostitute necessarily, but a woman in tremendous need and in sexual sin. She was the doggiest of the dogs in a way.

You know, they usually would go to get water early in the morning or in the late afternoon. It wasn’t unusual for women to draw water. It was their task. But it was unusual to go at the middle of the day. And we’re specifically given the sixth hour here as the middle of the day, the noon, when Jesus is at the well and is thirsty. By the way, quite another statement in John of his humanity as well as throughout the Gospel of John, his divinity being shown.

So she’s there in the middle of the day. Why? Because, you know, she’s an outcast. The other women have probably made her an outcast. She’s had these five husbands and living with a sixth guy. So it’s almost as if it’s worst-case scenario. This is worse than the Gentiles here. These are Samaritans. They’re really dogs. And this is the worst of the Samaritans—some woman who’s lived with five husbands and is engaged with sexual sin with another man. Tremendous need.

So in the context of all of that, Christianity—you know, Judaism—has gone to the dogs in Samaria. It has completely fallen apart. Remember, the Samaritans are like America. They had a short Bible. We’ve got twenty-seven out of sixty-six. The New Testament that most churches hold to and don’t want to read the Old Testament. Samaritans had five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, and they didn’t want to read the rest of the Old Testament. They didn’t believe the prophets and all that stuff. And they even rewrote a portion of the Pentateuch. So they were short Bible people, and they interpreted their Bible as a result completely wrongly—the way that much of Christianity today interprets the New Testament completely wrongly, not understanding its correlation to the Old Testament. And so Samaria is in a position of great neediness. They’re really out there.

And now, Judaism in its full flourish and the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ—Christianity comes to the dogs, preaches the gospel to them and recreates them. And so what we have here is a tremendous story of great blessing in the midst of what would at that time have looked pretty dismal.

Now we don’t know—it seems likely based on the other synoptic Gospels—the other three gospels, the so-called synoptics—that with John 4, we are now in the second year of his ministry. First year he goes down to Passover, you know, after the wedding at Cana, he cleanses the temple, talks to Nicodemus, and it looks like then we have this immediate story afterwards, but some time has probably elapsed. And we have reason to believe that one reason—another reason the text doesn’t tell us this, but the other gospels do—remember, John always assumes you’ve read the other gospels. At the end of chapter three, we read of John the Baptist, and it said there parenthetically, “This was before John had been thrown into prison.”

Now it said that because as you’re reading the Gospel of John, the assumption is you know Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and you’ve already read about John being thrown in prison by Herod. So it wants to tell you that this happened before he was thrown into prison. Well, this event now happens probably after John is thrown into prison. And that’s another reason for Jesus’s journey away from Jerusalem in the second year of his ministry. We’ll talk more about that as we get to chapter five in terms of the chronology of this gospel. But in all likelihood, John is now in prison. So the Edomite king is ruling in Jerusalem and in Israel rather. Good people are being thrown into jail and maybe beheaded already. I don’t know. Things are bad. Jesus is going up to the north. It looks like a dark hour and yet it’s the bright hour of the gospel.

If we understand Samaria and its depth, its dogginess, we understand how when all the men of this village at Sychem become Christians and say at the end of the account, at the end of this story, that Jesus is the savior of the world—you see it takes us into this brightness of the shining of the gospel in the midst of a very dark hour.

So we’re in a dark hour in America today. We’ve got a syncretistic version of Christianity. Christianity is going to the dogs, not just in England but in America. But it is in those periods of time when Christianity in its truest sense and the people of God who go into this world with the message of our savior kill the dogs and cause them to be reborn to be beautiful creatures.

The Samaritan woman is killed in a sense. She’s joined with Christ in his death. She recognizes her walking deadness and her need to the end that she become alive in Christ. There are all these movies these days about ghosts, you know, The Sixth Sense and others. And you get to the end, you realize the guy you thought was alive is dead. I like those stories because that’s the way reality is.

As you leave this place today and as you go to your workplace tomorrow, you will drive down roads. I drove down a road in Canby last week and every—you know, there’s all these crosses that line the road. We call them telephone poles, but you know, they’re crosses. You go to Poland and all these windows have crosses in them. I don’t know who put the windows in or who put the poles up, but I know that God is shouting to a dead culture, “You are dead and you need the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. You need to come to life.” We have the walking dead in the context of where we’ll go tomorrow as we go back into the world.

And God wants us to take the message of Christianity to the dogs that they might die and that Christians might be reborn in the context of their belief in the Lord Jesus Christ and transformation might occur. And while it may seem very dark in the context of our situation, Christianity is not thriving, the culture is declining—still God says it’s in these periods of declension that really the gospel then begins to shine forth quite brightly. And that’s what we want to see. We want this text to help us to see how God is going to shine forth quite brightly into the context of our particular world. How do we do that? How does the Lord Jesus Christ speak to the dogs of our culture, bringing them to death and resurrection and union with him?

Now what we’ve said is that there is this type scene set up in the context of this account. In other words, it’s important to us here to recognize what’s going on in the details of the text. And part of this was this whole reference to Samaria. And we said another part of this is that what we see here is a story that reminds us of all kinds of other Old Testament stories. It reminds us of Isaac’s dad going to a well and securing a bride. It reminds us of Jacob going to a well and securing a bride. It reminds us of Moses going to a well and securing a bride—one of the daughters that he rescues there from the shepherds. So we see all these images, these type scenes, so to speak, from the Old Testament, and it reminds us that this is a story of marriage.

Now John has prepared us for that at the end of chapter 3 because we remember that John the Baptist in reference to Jesus and his disciples baptizing said, “He’s the bridegroom. He’s got the bride.” And then here we are in chapter 4 being given a picture of the bride—the men of the city, the woman representing the bride, the church of Christ that’s going to come out of the Samaritan nation.

He has the bride. And we have this bridal betrothal scene at this well. And what we said is that each of these type scenes reveals the character of the man involved. You know, Isaac is completely passive, right? He’s the picture of the submission of the son to the father. Father goes and secures him a bride without any involvement on his part at all. Isaac we most well know for his account of him being submissive to the father—to go up and lay down on the stone and if necessary be killed for the glory of God. And of course, God provides a substitute. Isaac is a picture of Christ in submission to the father. And that’s all portrayed right at the well scene because he’s not even there when his bride is secured.

Jacob is a picture of a wrestler—who’s always wrestling with people and things. Things are difficult for him. And at his well scene, he’s got to wrestle that stone off to give his bride water from the well. He’s got a big heavy stone. He’s got to wrestle it off.

Moses is a deliverer. It’s what he’s going to do. And he delivers his bride and other women as well at this well from guys that were not letting him water their flocks. He beats them back and then he gives water to his bride. And he’s in the wilderness, right? That’s where he’s at. He’s fled from Egypt and he’s going to deliver his people. Then he’s going to give them water in the wilderness as a picture of Jesus Christ.

Well, Jesus is portrayed in this type scene as well at this well. And what does it focus on? We said what it focuses on is the last statement. That’s the culmination of these seven statements of his. And He says that I am the one who speaks. Now in the translation into English it loses a little something, but that’s basically what he says. I am—the name of God in the Old Testament. And he’s going to repeat that many times throughout the Gospel of John. I am the one speaking.

So he declares himself to be Messiah to the woman’s query. But more importantly, as importantly, he reveals Messiah to be the speaking one. The Lord Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word. The word reveals the father. So yes, he’s the greater Isaac. He’s the greater son, submissive to the father. He’s the greater Jacob. He wrestles, you know, for us and obtains blessing for us in the context of his strivings. And he’s also the greater Moses. He delivers us and gives us water in the wilderness. But he does this by means not of physical wrestling or physical submission or physical deliverance as much as he does it through his word, through his speaking.

Now that’s quite important for us. If Christianity is going to go to the dogs of our culture, it goes first and foremost in the same manner that Jesus reveals himself to the woman at Samaria. It goes first and foremost with speech. Not good enough just to live a Christian lifestyle in the context of your friends and neighbors and stuff and leave it at that. That is not primary in scripture. What’s primary, at least in this text, is that we speak to the people of our culture that we engage with.

And so this type scene reminds us of that. Turn to Acts chapter 8. I referenced this last week, but we didn’t look at the verses. I think it’s interesting.

Acts chapter 8. This is where the gospel is now going to—you know, went to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, uttermost parts of the world. So what happens here is it’s going to Samaria where Philip is going to go preach.

Acts 8:5. Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ unto them. See, he goes in the steps of the savior. We talked about Peter in the book of Acts. The church goes in the steps of the savior. And so we go to our Samaria as well.

Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ unto them. And the people with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spake, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did. For unclean spirits, crying with loud voices came out of many that were possessed with them. And many taken with palsies and that were lame were healed. And there was great joy in that city.

So in these first verses of this account in Samaria, it does talk about him preaching Christ and his words, but it talks about the effect of the miracles upon the people. Dogs are superstitious rather, not suspicious. Cultures that go pagan become increasingly superstitious. Now they may turn to rationalism first, but rationalism is never a satisfactory answer for the religious character of man. The sixth statement that Jesus will make, correlating with the sixth day of man’s creation, is that man is created to worship him, to worship God the father. So pagan man always degenerates into superstitious man.

And so these signs and miracles—this is the big deal of the Samaritans. The tale goes on to tell us that they were being deceived by a magician. See, they follow, you know, power. They follow demonstrations and signs of miracles. And that’s what we have at first. But glance down to verse 12 after it talks about Simon deluding them.

And in verse 12, “But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized both men and women.”

The emphasis in Acts on the conversion of the Samaritans is not the miracles that produces joy, that produces, you know, attention and all that stuff from a superstitious people. But what leads to their baptism, to their union with Christ, to them becoming dead dogs and resurrected in the Lord Jesus Christ, to men and women? What leads to that is in the text here: Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ. You see the type scene of Jesus Christ as the one who speaks at the well of Samaria is what Philip was engaged with. Philip speaks and Jesus speaks to this city of Samaria directly now and they convert and become baptized, and this involves both men and women.

So Samaria is a picture of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ recreating a people, bringing about the implications of the creation, the new creation in him. Who preached at Samaria after Jesus died and rose again? Philip. Philip is the answer to that. And that’s a picture of Philip now doing just what Jesus had done—going to Samaria, preaching the name of Christ, and as a result, the people being converted.

Okay. And kids, in terms of your outline, I’ve asked you question number one: to match up the characters on the left and the characteristics on the right. Jacob is of course the wrestler. Jacob wrestles with God at Peniel. So you draw a line from Jacob down to the wrestler. He wrestles the stone away to give his bride water, and so does Jesus. Moses is the deliverer. He delivers his bride and gives her water in the wilderness. And that’s what happens at his well scene. So you draw a line from Moses to the deliverer. Jesus is the speaking one—in speech revealing the father to his bride. That’s what Jesus does here. The father desires true worshippers and “I am the one who speaks” is what Jesus says. He is Messiah. And then Isaac is the passive one submitting to the father and receiving his bride.

What’s your character like? I think it’s worthwhile to ask that question. These things are types of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. They’re real people. And you know it’s not—you know, a passive one is not worse off than a wrestling one, who is not worse off than a delivering one. God calls people to particular personality types and missions in the context of your life. I’ve got, you know, five kids and they’re all quite different from one another. And we shouldn’t try to make everybody into the same model in terms of their basic character.

Children, you should meditate. How did God make you? Are you kind of more like the passive one like Isaac? Are you a little more involved and always wrestling and don’t know why things always go bad in your life? Are you a wrestling one like Jacob? Does God in his great wisdom and love for you give you a lot of difficulties in life like Jacob had? Or do things just sort of come to you the way that Isaac, you know, things just sort of came to him? Or do you have to actually have a heart for other people to deliver them in groups like Moses did? You see, there’s different aspects to the character of Christ that’s revealed in his people. And it’s good for us to help our children reflect on who they are and what kind of vocations they could enter into based upon their particular characteristics.

You know, Jesus is the preeminent model, but he models all kinds of things to us and he sees fit in his unity and diversity to give diverse giftings and characteristics to his people. It’d be good for parents to help their children think through who they’re sort of like—maybe these guys or maybe somebody completely different—and to use their unique giftings and abilities in the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now ultimately we’re all Christians and as Christians we must be speaking ones. And that’s the whole point of this sermon—to tell us that in order to witness to the culture round about us, in order to see the dogs of our culture converted, in order to go to the dogs as a Christian people and see them be transformed into men, you got to talk. You got to use the vocal cords. You got to articulate speech.

Jesus declares that in terms of his calling of the village of Sychem. You know, Sychem means like lie town or drunken town. And you know, the world round about us, whenever it’s in a position of denying Christ, does not comport with reality. It’s drunk and it thinks things wrongly and it is also deceitful. We’re called to think things rightly, to declare the reality around about us to a drunken town, to bring them to sobriety. And we’re called as faithful witnesses of Christ to urge other people not to lies but to faithfulness at the center of their being.

Now what I’ve given you here is the same outline as last week. I urged you to kind of look it over a little bit in preparation for the sermon today. And you know, I know some of you don’t like this, but you know, from my perspective, if I see a sevenfold sequence of events, I’m at least meditating a little bit on my night watches—as the psalm we read responsively—meditating on the grace of God in our night watches. I’m at least meditating on how that might correlate to the seven days of creation.

I do this for a couple of purposes. I do this number one to remind myself of creation and how it works. I do it, you know, to see, to remember this. And I also use it as a memorization device to remember a portion of scripture. I asked one of my children yesterday or the day before, “What was the fourth thing that Jesus said to the woman at Samaria?” And he knew. He knew that it was a statement about the woman’s husband. And he knew it because he knows that the fourth slot in the creation week is sun, moon, and stars representing authorities. You see, and he tied that right away. And he can remember now that at the center of the seven statements of Christ to the Samaritan woman is the statement about the authority in her life, her husband. See, he remembers that. So it’s a way to remember things as well.

And I think it’s a very important theme of scripture that God wants us to think about from the beginning to the end of the Bible. We’re going to be teaching two different classes of very young children starting December 1 in our new Sunday school year. I think it’s three and four in one and five to seven in the other class. Both of them will be going through Genesis, the first half of the school year. And we want our kids—and they can do this from, you know, ages three or four—we want them to know the seven days of creation, to know what happened, and to begin to build this structure of interpreting reality based upon God’s revelation of who he is in these seven days of creation.

Book of Revelation falls out very neatly into a seven-day pattern. The feasts of Israel in Leviticus 23 fall into the same seven-day pattern as the days of creation. It’s not the only way to look at reality, but it is a very central theme. It is a dominant melody that goes throughout the long song of human history.

The way the spirit moves in this sevenfold action—you know, God begins the sevenfold by creating what? Light. So he starts the thing off by creating light, a picture of his presence with people. And on the second day comes the firmament which makes a division between heavenly waters and earthly waters. And what we said is that one of the big things that goes on in that is that heavenly waters are going to come to the dead earthly waters after Adam’s sin and make a new creation. That’s the whole picture of the first four chapters of John’s gospel—is water from above coming down making a new creation.

On the third day the water and the land separate and the land becomes fruitful. So these great blessings of fruitfulness come. The first trees grow up. The first plants representing bread and wine eventually come up. And so the third festival is First Fruits. The beginning of the harvest is pictured. Jesus raises up on the third day.

Fourth day, sun, moon, and stars—both for signs as well as they rule over things. The sun rules by day. The moon rules by night. You know, the woman reflects the glory of the man. The woman has real rule, but it’s a reflected glory in the context of the son. This woman at the well in Samaria—she’s got no glory because she’s got no husband. She’s in complete darkness, you see. And so it’s important to know that. And authorities are set up in the fourth day to rule over—sun rules over the day and the night.

Fifth day, God fills the heavens and the seas with birds and fishes. And he gives his first command. He tells them to be fruitful and multiply. So there’s the command of God given and multiplication of these blessings that began on the third day—with organic creation or with creatures now being created and teeming around. A whole bunch of birds and a whole bunch of fishes. There’s a multiplication of blessings that’s pictured on that fifth day.

And the sixth day, man is made. This is, you know, the height of creation. Adam is made. Eve. And so we have, you know, man—the centrality of man is what the sixth day is all about. And then the seventh day, of course, is rest. But it isn’t just rest. It’s rest in the finished work of our savior. It’s rest in God. But it’s rest that involves the coming of God to his creation to evaluate it and to bring it to a state of rest after judgment. So the Sabbath day and the Christian Lord’s Day is a day when God comes to be with us. And when we see Jesus going to Jerusalem at the Passover, he comes and brings judgment. And in chapter 5, when he comes to the feast of tabernacles, he comes and judgment is revealed. And so that seventh day is the day of evaluation and rest of the finished work of our savior.

Well, I believe the statements of Christ have some correlation to this pattern, and it helps us to see—the way I’ve structured it is how the spirit goes about doing his work as he brings about the new creation.

Okay, we’ve said in the beginning it’s how John’s gospel started. We’re going to have a new creation account going on in John’s gospel and we’ve seen this through, you know, in various ways. And here we see a sevenfold movement of the spirit. The spirit has seven eyes in the book of Revelation. The spirit is sevenfold. The spirit moves in this kind of action to bring about the new creation just as he moved in a sevenfold pattern at the original creation of the world.

So we can look at these seven statements and draw these correlations. And so what I’m going to do is really look mostly at the second part of your outline, the sevenfold movement of the Holy Spirit. The spirit calls the bride by using this pattern. And what I want us to see is that it’s a way for us to remember how we speak to the culture round about us to bring about conversion in the hearts of people, in the context of people’s lives, and how we change—you know, our drunken town of Oregon City to become sober town, our lying town to become faithful town and to become increasingly sober and more faithful as more people are brought to the faith in the context of Oregon City.

Well, it all begins with initiation and engagement with the culture. I don’t mean engagement in the sense of betrothal. I mean engagement. You engage. You know, husbands, my wife frequently in the grace of God is being used by God to call me to engage. When I come home, husbands come home and they don’t engage the family. They like to just sort of sit. They’re tired. They’ve worn out. But there’s problems at home. You got to remember as you go through that door, husbands, put on your father-husband cap, apart from the work cap, engage in that culture. Bring, you know, evaluations, judgments, bring a sense of biblical oversight with you as you come into the door.

Well, here Jesus sits down at this well and engages this woman. Now that’s a big deal. As I’ve said before—I probably stressed this too much—but you know, everybody’s shocked. The woman’s shocked. The disciples are shocked. Not just because you got a guy talking to a woman. That’s bad enough. But you got a guy talking to the doggiest of dogs here—to a Samaritan. You know, the Gentiles were dogs, right? Jesus says the Gentiles are dogs. Dogs eat the crumbs under the table. Well, the Samaritans are worse than dogs. They were treated as worse. So he breaks all kinds of social conventions in engaging the culture round about him.

And we look around at our particular places where we are and we see the outcasts of society and those are the people we tend to want to shy away from. Easier to witness to, you know, to the guys who are more normal like us. Easy to justify that. Well, you know, if God—this person’s really their judgment. So, you know, maybe I shouldn’t talk to them. But in the providence of God, we’re to go to the dogs, right? Jesus goes to this woman and engages her in conversation.

And so the first thing we need to remember is this need for engagement, initiation to begin to bring light to the darkness by using our speech to engage particular people in the context of our lives.

The spirit initiates meaningful interaction engaging the culture. The spirit calls men to serve Jesus. Jesus says, “Give me a drink.” See, he begins by telling her to serve him. Now he’s going to turn around and give her life eternal. He’s going to give her the greater gift. Jesus says, “Come worship me.” And you come here with your gift of worship to God. And then you realize when you get here that he’s called you here to receive from his hand and to recognize whatever you have has come from him. Whose water is it? It’s Christ’s water.

He engages her in meaningful conversation and he calls her to serve Jesus. So we are to call men to serve Jesus, and Jesus uses the simplest of reality to produce this kind of meaningful dialogue with someone. He talks about water. With Nicodemus he talked about wind. There is nothing more basic. Water, wind. These are pictures of the spirit certainly. But you see, really the world is created by God to portray who he is to us. It’s only our deafness and the blinders we put on our eyes and the earplugs we put in our ears because we get tired of God shouting at us that really makes us fail to interpret the reality around about us as a message from God. That’s general revelation.

And we’re to take those plugs out of people’s ears and take the blinders off their eyes by engaging them in simple but meaningful conversation about the world in which we live, the commonalities of life. You sit at the water hole at work, right? Get together at break. You share a little water. Everybody’s taking some water from stuff. You’re drinking coffee. You got the same tools right there that Jesus used to engage this Samaritan woman in a discussion of deep realities that would bring about recreation.

The spirit begins with initiation and engagement.

Children, how did Jesus start the talk with the woman at the well? He asked for water. That’s how it all starts. He asked for water. Simple, right? What do you have to do first to talk to people about Jesus? What do you have to do first? Well, you got to talk to them. It’s quite simple. It’s probably the most difficult part of what we do in terms of witnessing is that first moment of talking to someone. It’s also hard to move it to a consideration of deeper realities. But you know, frequently social conventions, difficulty, pride, fear, whatever it is—we don’t talk to people in America particularly. Plus we live in an urban area and you’re used to seeing people not as images created in the image of God, but we’re used to seeing people just as kind of parts of machines. You go get your groceries. You go pump the gas. There’s, you know, hello, goodbye, maybe a little bit of that, but you don’t see people as people.

You know, we’re supposed to put on the eyes of Christ. We’re to see people in their great need and their great difficulties if they don’t have the work of Christ in their lives, and we are to engage those people, not in some just external formalistic way but in a meaningful way.

Children, you know, I’m urging you here to talk to your friends and neighbors. But your parents will tell you—you shouldn’t talk to the bum on the street. If you got a guy, a homeless person on the street, go have mom and dad talk to that person or go grab Jesse or Michael L.—grab an older guy to go talk to those people. You shouldn’t do that. But you should talk to your friends and neighbors. You should talk to people. If you’re going to a school, talk to your friends at school. If you’re going to recreational events, you should engage them and begin to talk to them.

Jesus, secondly—oh, the other thing I wanted to point out as we go through this is so I’ve got the sevenfold thing in bold and I’ve got the five-fold covenant pattern in italics, “Call.” So you know, God calls us to worship. And he calls us in terms of covenant renewal services. We’ll talk about that relationship here, but very simply after the italic words under 1–7, I have a simple statement: “Pray for and use opportunities.”

Okay, so you can either think of it as creation, engagement, initiation—you bring light to a dark situation—or very simply, for the children or for adults who want to think more simplistically, it’s simple: you pray that God give you opportunities to engage people in a meaningful way and then you use the opportunities that God has provided for you.

When I was traveling like from Grants Pass with Monty Harmon, he had an opportunity to witness to a man at a motel there where he was staying. And he’d been going to this class out at John S.’s house on how to do evangelism and stuff. And he was praying for an opportunity to be able to use some of the things that he was learning there. And lo and behold, this guy comes along and it kind of goes right classically through all the elements that they had been talking about at John S.’s evangelism class. So you see, you pray for opportunities and God answers those prayers.

So pray, children, pray, adults that God would let us witness to the people in the context of our culture.

Secondly, Jesus then begins to talk to the woman. And what I put on your outline is “division,” “life and death.”

Jesus brings blessings to the woman. Now she initiates this context of division by talking about Jews and Samaria. But he says, “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.” So Jesus draws a contrast between the true source of water—himself and life—and the dead water that she was, you know, thinking in terms of. He brings blessing to her in the context of talking about this gift of Christ.

The spirit of God points to heavenly living water as the gift that Christ offers to a dead world. So as you engage people and begin to talk to them, you know, the pattern is God loves his people and has a wonderful plan for their lives. That’s perfectly appropriate as long as you don’t make it specific to that person because we don’t know about that particular person. But we do know that what our savior starts with is with a reference to gift and a reference to the blessings of living water from above and eternal life. Our savior begins by emphasizing the good news.

Our gospel is not neutral news. It’s not primarily negative news. Our message is not primarily, you know, “You’re going to be destroyed on the path you’re on.” Our message is primarily, “Praise God, Yahoo, the new creation is here. The Lord Jesus Christ is giving a gift to the world and he’s providing great blessings of which all the things that you look around in life and are happy about are pale shadows in comparison” to what he’s doing. That’s the message of the gospel. The gospel is good news. The gospel is praise God, Yahoo.

The spirit of God begins to work by offering gift and offering living water.

Now another reason that we sometimes—it’s kind of fun to look at these structures: What’s the sixth thing that Jesus says to the Samaritan woman? Those of you here last week, what’s the sixth day? Man. The sixth thing is Jesus points to why man was created. Why was man created? Man was created to worship God. So the sixth thing that Jesus says to the Samaritan woman is God wants worshippers. He’s getting worshippers. That’s what a man is. You know, the ultimate definition of a man is one who worships God in spirit and in truth.

Now I’m going to spend a whole sermon in a month and a half from now on that phrase “in spirit and in truth” to talk about what it means. But it’s interesting if you look at here in number two and number six. Frequently they form up in a chiastic structure. If you don’t like this stuff, just tune it out for now. If you’re interested though, think about this: What does Jesus say? He says there’s a gift that God is going to give you. How is that word “gift” used later in the Gospel of John? It’s the gift of the Holy Spirit. So he seems to be referring to the Holy Spirit and himself. He’s the gift of God. And then he says that you’re going to have living water. See, he’s Joseph. Joseph was down in the well, right? He was down in the deep pit. That Jesus is the greater Joseph. He’s going to save the world. He’s going to be bread for the world, water for the world. So the two things that Jesus says in number two—there’s a gift and this is living water—seem to be able to be correlated to worship in spirit and in truth. He is the truth. He is the faithful witness. He is the living water. And the spirit seems to have a correlation here to the gift of God.

We’ll talk about that more in about a month or five weeks when we talk about spirit and truth. But it’s a way to again kind of meditate on the structure and begin to see connections in the context of the text that we wouldn’t ordinarily see.

Jesus then—the spirit rather—moves to draw. He points to heavenly living water as the gift that Christ offers to a dead world. And the spirit interprets reality, tying earthly symbols to heavenly realities, attacking idolatry. I mentioned this last week. See, this woman is an idolater. She thinks that the only thing really real is water—this kind of water. And Jesus says, “No, you need living water.” Now it’s interesting because the word “living water”—the word “living” means moving. It moves. You know, it’s simple correlation to make—something’s alive because it’s moving around. And so you don’t have any moving water. All you have is stagnant water. See that’s the image that Jesus is portraying to her.

And she’s thinking, “Well yeah, you know, we don’t really have any living water. We don’t have any moving water. There’s many brooks or streams flowing. There’s no springs. All we have is this deep well that Jacob dug real deep and it’s dead water. But where are you gonna get living water?”

See, the thing is, Sychem—this city has no moving, living water. That’s what’s being portrayed. Jesus is talking in spiritual terms, but he’s using reality. He’s using the physical, created, real reality as a way to talk about that. And he’s bringing home to her the complete absence of any fulfilling of her deepest needs to be found in the context of the Samaritan culture that she lives in. So he’s using that kind of imagery for her here. He’s—and that’s, you know, we make fun of her. Doesn’t she know what he’s talking about? Like Nicodemus couldn’t figure it out? Well, that’s because his language is deliberately ambiguous. He says moving water. You see, he’s going to speak—those who have ears to hear can hear it. But she couldn’t hear it at first until the spirit brings her to recognize what he’s talking about.

So anyway, the transcendent God—you know, right? The five-fold covenant. God comes, he calls us to him, and then he declares who he is to us in worship, right? So Jesus initiates conversation and he declares who God is. And he says that God is a giver. God gives gifts and God is the one alone here that can bring you living, life-filled water.