Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – John 4:27-38

Sermon text today is found in John 4:27-38. The sermon topic for today is “True Food, Working Your Field.” As you find your place in the scriptures, let me just mention again that there are visitor cards in the pews. Those cards can also be used by members of the congregation to request special prayer or a meeting with pastors. Please stand for the reading of God’s word, John chapter 4, verses 27-38.

And at this point his disciples came and they marveled that he talked with a woman. Yet no one said, “What do you seek? Or why are you talking with her?” The woman then left her water pot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, “Come, see a man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” Then they went out of the city and came to him. In the meantime, his disciples urged him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” Therefore, the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him anything to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

Do you not say there are still four months and then comes the harvest? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest. And he who reaps receives wages and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. For in this the saying is true, one sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored. Others have labored and you have entered into their labors.

Let us pray. Merciful God and heavenly Father, we ask you to give us the light of spiritual understanding that we, being instructed by the pure doctrine of your word, may walk in the way of your truth and that we may know, love, and obey you ever more fully in this life and rejoice in you forever in the world to come. Through Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Amen. Please be seated. There are a couple of changes to your orders of worship this Lord’s day. As you know now, the processional will normally be found on the inside cover of the order of worship, making it a little easier to collect your papers. And the sermon outline has been moved to the back page of the order of worship so that it might be easier for you to take with you as you leave church today.

It’s why we’ve been doing the announcements on the back—you can take them with you, pray about those things during the week, be reminded of them—and this way you can have the sermon outline back there as well to remind yourself. One of the very useful ways to do family worship at times is to go through the sermon, and the outline provides you a vehicle for doing that in the context of your family should you decide to do that.

Now we have here in this text the continuing story of the woman at the well in Samaria, at Sikar in Samaria. We spent a couple of weeks talking about the dialogue between Jesus and the woman. There was at these one of these pastor prayer meetings that I attended in Oregon City a project that some evangelicals are doing was discussed, and I don’t know a whole lot about it, but the idea of the project is to invite Jesus into your city. So, you know, pastors in Oregon City would all agree, “Let’s fight, let’s invite Jesus in.” Now, it’s not as if he’s not here, but it’s kind of like, “Let’s really get a sense of the presence of Christ.”

Well, here we see Jesus entering into this city of Sikar. And the text now, after going through this dialogue between Jesus and the woman, paints us a picture of life abounding as a result of Jesus coming into the context of Sikar. And so, with this one-on-one dialogue being concluded, we see things happening. We see the woman run off to the village, tell her men—apparently so excited, she leaves her water pot. The disciples come back before she takes off and they see him talking to a woman. So they’re impacted by Jesus. The woman is impacted. The disciples are impacted. What’s going on? They can’t quite figure it out. The men of the village will come back now to Jesus with the woman to report in their ears. They’ll run back.

So when Jesus comes to the city, things start to happen and everything begins to change. It’s a picture here of life abounding as the Lord Jesus Christ comes to be with the people.

Ephraim the Syrian, one of the early church fathers, said this about Jesus’s interaction at Sikar: “Jesus came to the fountain as a hunter. He threw a grain before one pigeon that he might catch the whole flock. At the beginning of the conversation, he did not make himself known to her, but first she caught sight of a thirsty man, then a Jew, then a rabbi, afterwards a prophet, and last of all, the Messiah. She tried to get the better of the thirsty man. She showed dislike of the Jew. She heckled the rabbi. She was swept off her feet by the prophet. And she adored the Christ.”

And so people have noticed this movement of life welling up in the context of this woman. And then it has this impact all around them as well. So on the first part of the children’s outline, you can match up what happens here in the context of John 4:27-38. The Samaritan woman runs to the village, leaving behind her water jug. The disciples wonder why Jesus is talking to a woman at all. And the men of Sikar come to see who this Messiah might be. And so there’s all this life that happens when Jesus comes with the people.

And that’s our hope for today—that grand entrance of Christ through his word might cause life to abound in the context of each of our homes as we go forth to them and in the context of our church as well.

Now the first thing I want to notice from this text and outline, moving on to Roman numeral number one, is hope for the despised: from outcast to savior. Now “savior,” you know, with a little “s”—the outline has capitalized that’s the theme, that’s how you do outlines—but I’m using “savior” here in the small sense of the term. The woman is moved from being an outcast of the city to becoming then one who brings the message of the Christ and who affects transformation in the context of her entire community.

She begins as an outcast, and we’ve talked about this point before. She’s an outcast for several reasons. One is the fact that she’s a Samaritan and not a Jew. She’s an outcast as well because of her sins. You know, she’s had five husbands. She’s living with a guy now. And that involves a degree of social isolation. She’s at the well at the wrong time of day from what the other women would normally be there. She’s kind of an outcast. And you know, women in general were somewhat of an outcast.

And in fact, I think that in any culture that really is not Christian, women are sort of looked upon as scapegoats or outcasts. We’ve seen this and we’ve thought about this a lot the last couple of weeks with the attack on the World Trade Center. And those of us who have begun to do a little study in Islam are just horrified by the way the women are treated. And there are people in our congregation whose relatives have grown up in Muslim lands, and the context of that—and the great disparagement that’s placed upon women.

You know, I had an article this week that I got from a missionary in Indonesia, and he said, “Well, you know, if you want to know why these two fellas are at a strip bar drinking alcohol the night before they bombed the World Trade Center, it’s because they were getting ready for paradise.” And the Islamic religion, fundamentally understood, paradise is a place where you get serviced sexually. Women, you know, are there just as basically objects for your satisfaction.

The only way for a wife to get to heaven in the Islamic faith is for the husband to call her, which I guess I found out from George Schuman is similar to the Mormon view of things—the husband has to call the wife. Well, in the Islamic faith, the husband has to call the wife into paradise. And so you can imagine with that sort of trump card hanging over them, you know, the way men treat their wives and the subjugation that’s produced there.

So we become a little more aware of how religious groups are really intolerant of women. Well, the same thing is really true of Judaism apart from Christianity as well. Let me read you a couple of quotes from the rabbis who commented on the Old Testament in Orthodox Judaism. One rabbinic precept ran: “Let no one talk with a woman in the street. No, not with his own wife, even in the context of the street.”

The rabbis so despised women and thought them incapable of receiving any real teaching that they said this: “Better that the words of the law should be burned than delivered to a woman.” They had a saying, “Each time that a man prolongs conversation with a woman, he causes evil to himself and desists from the law and in the end inherits Gehenna—inherits hell, the fires of hell.”

So both in the Muslim religion as well as in Orthodox Judaism, women are not seen really as first-class citizens. Now I know that liberal Judaism and liberal Islamic faith—I’m not saying that everybody that holds these religions has this perspective. But what I am saying is the disciples’ reaction to Jesus talking to a woman should be understood in the context of, you know, kind of the built-in scapegoat nature that man has put on women since the Fall.

Since the Fall there’s been this alienation of the sexes that we see in Adam accusing the wife as being the cause for his own disobedience. And in man’s fallen state, man being physically more powerful, he subjects women to degradation. That’s what it’s all about.

And so she’s an outcast not just because of these other reasons, but this text shows us that the disciples even sort of thought, “Why is he even talking to a woman?” with the contemporary precepts that you shouldn’t really discuss things with women—they’re not capable of understanding them. So we have this woman as an outcast, and we have the realization that it’s only in Christianity that women find equal status with men in the sight of God and develop into the sort of callings that they attend to and the sort of correct place of respect and honor that the scriptures tell us should be accorded to them.

Now the disciples have enough sense, though, even in wondering about this, not to speak a word of it to Jesus. See, this is the—you know, don’t feel bad if you have thoughts like that, you know?—but understand that discipleship is moving away from those thoughts and controlling our external manifestations of what we’re doing in obedience to the Savior. The Savior’s talking to the woman. They don’t get it, but they don’t have to get it. They want to—our thoughts should be corrected as we watch our Savior interact with this woman.

Okay. So it’s significant that they look at her as an outcast, as a woman. But it’s also significant that the Spirit of God is moving in the disciples of Christ to keep them from speaking foolishly about what was going on there. So that goes on, and so this woman is an outcast.

But this woman who was an outcast becomes a zealous trumpet in verses 28 and 29. The woman then left her water pot, went away into the city, and said to the men, “Come see a man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”

So the picture here is the woman, having come to a recognition of her sinfulness. “He’s told me all things that ever I did,” referring to her relationship to five husbands and now a sexual relationship outside the bonds of marriage. She’s brought to conviction of her sin. But it doesn’t end there. You know, that’s the beginning point. At the beginning of the Christian faith, a man sees only himself. Some have said, and what they mean by that is as Christ comes to a person to bring him to salvation, he comes and brings them a sense of conviction for their own sins.

So they loom large in their sight as Jesus brings them to himself because they recognize, you know, that all of their life has been lived in opposition to the Lord Jesus Christ. So a recognition of where we’re at as outcasts, as sinners, and suffering the results of our sin precedes then the next step in the woman’s progression, which is to become a zealous trumpet. She is a bell ringing forth now to bring men to the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. She has become part of the bride of Christ.

Notice that song: “Killing Me Softly with His Words.” “Telling my whole life with his words. Killing me softly with his song.” Jesus kills us softly as it were. When his word brings conviction for our sins and puts the old man on that cross in union with him, raises us back up. But he tells our whole life through his scriptures. He brings conviction to the center of our being. But he moves us. His purpose in that is not negative. His purpose in doing that is to bring us to resurrection strength.

In Revelation 22:17, we read that the Spirit and the bride say “Come.” So here this former outcast is now seen as a member of the bride of Christ, saying to other men, “Come.” The Spirit and the bride say “Come.”

And this woman who was an outcast becomes now part of the bride of Christ and she’s used by God. It’s not just a trumpet blown that doesn’t summon people. Verse 30 says, “Then the men then they went out of the city and came to him.” And next week we’ll see that they all have this universal affirmation that he is the Christ, the Savior of the world.

So God sees fit from the earliest days of one’s conversion, the earliest moments here, to use people as his vessels to bring people to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now I think that taken in total this is quite encouraging to us. This woman brought many men to Jesus Christ. She was like, you know, if we could think of her as a Billy Graham, she brings a whole village of people to the Lord Jesus Christ, and they all come to an affirmation that he is the Christ, the Savior of the world. This outcast has become part of the beautiful bride of Christ and effectually trumpeting forth the Gospel.

Now this should be an encouraging text for us. It tells us that you don’t have to wait until you get full knowledge of everything about the Lord Jesus Christ in the scriptures to begin to tell men, “Hey, Jesus Christ is Messiah. He’s the Savior. We need to be saved from our sins.” The littlest child can tell someone that great truth. And so it’s hope for us. More than that, I think it’s hope for some of us particularly and maybe all of us at some level as we see this transition of this woman again from outcast to being part of the Savior’s work in the context of Sikar.

You know, there’s a big theme that some theologians have looked at in the scriptures: that Jesus is the ultimate outcast. You know, Jesus becomes the ultimate scapegoat for the sins of people. He becomes the one that everybody throws their insults and reviles. He’s all alone as he goes to the cross. Even his disciples deny him as he goes to the cross. He’s the ultimate outcast for mankind.

But of course, he, in the providence of God, God uses him as that outcast to carry the sins of all of us who are outcasts and bring us to salvation through his work. And people have noticed here that it is in the character of man to blame someone else. Adam blaming his wife, his wife blaming the serpent or whatever it is. We’re always having this idea to scapegoat somebody else and produce outcasts in the context of our world, and maybe that’s been done to you. I’m sure it has been at various times in your life.

Some of you right now are feeling like you’re a real outcast period. You know, your life—you don’t think your life as a Christian maybe measures up. Other people are looking at you and thinking, “Gee, what’s wrong with that person?” in this or that area. And then some of you are outcast by people that we don’t know about. You have problems, interpersonal problems with other folks. They tend to put you down or maybe they talk about you. You become the scapegoat for their difficulties. This is a common experience in the human dilemma.

And what this woman shows us is there’s tremendous hope for the outcasts of this world. God is in the business of taking men who have been scapegoated and in part for their own—they really do, as this woman was, experiencing the effects of their own sin. But when we look at her nature as a woman, this is not an effect of her own sin. This is a cultural scapegoating. This is a cultural outcasting or degrading of someone else.

You know, one of the rabbis’ prayers was always to thank God that you didn’t make me a woman. So as a man, I can feel better about myself if I can think of women as lower. And women can do the same thing. They can think better of themselves if they think that men are just these biologically driven creatures that they have to put up with. We tend to scapegoat each other. We tend to make outcasts of each other.

And this woman is this tremendous picture of hope to us that as we respond correctly to the Lord Jesus Christ, as we come to conviction for our own sins, he is in the business—his job, his work that he is completing here (they’ll speak of here in a couple of verses)—the work that he does is to take outcasts like you and make them part of his saving work in the world.

Okay? He doesn’t choose many wise. Paul says he doesn’t choose many that are, you know, wise in the context of our world. He chooses the baser things of life. He chooses the outcast, the scapegoats, people that are suffering. He brings them to conviction for their sin and he then makes them elements of his work that brings salvation to the very ones who have despised them. I mean, the men of this village apparently despised this woman. She was an outcast from them. Jesus was despised by all, including the disciples. And yet he comes and gives his life for those very people.

And so God calls us, whether we’re scapegoats—to move beyond that into the saving work of the Savior—to think of these relationships and have them corrected by the application of the cross. You know what I’m saying is really very simple. You know, if you feel on the outside of the circle, number one, you’re probably not alone. It looks like everybody else is in the inner circle when we feel on the outside, but you know, most of us have feelings of being on the outside of the circle.

And the Lord Jesus Christ says, “Hey, don’t worry about that stuff. Come to proper repentance for your sins. Follow me. Be that sounding trumpet for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I will make you serve these very people who are not being good to you.” It is our job. What does it say? You know, when we’re persecuted, we’re to bless those who persecute us. This woman in her case is a living example to us in this text of doing just that. She was outcast from her city, but she then turns around and blesses the city with the knowledge of the Savior.

Important part of this text. Secondly, this text also is about a very important element: that the Savior’s true food is to finish the Father’s assigned work. Verses 31-34, we have here the disciples come back and we read in verses 31-33: “In the meantime his disciples urged him saying, ‘Rabbi, eat.’ But he said, ‘I have food to eat of which you do not know.’ Therefore, the disciples said one to another, ‘Has anyone brought him anything to eat?’”

So they don’t know what’s going on. First they’re confused by his interaction with the woman. Now they’re confused by him saying he has food to eat that they don’t know what it is. And you know, this is a common theme. We’ve already seen this. Nicodemus doesn’t understand the reference to the wind. The man in Jerusalem doesn’t understand the reference to the temple. The woman has misunderstood his reference to living water just a few verses earlier. He now makes reference to true food and they don’t get that either.

Jesus is always causing us to not look at things on a surface level but to think below that surface level to a more profound, foundational level of what these things represent in the providence of God. Now he does this to wean us away from idolatry. Now if we think of food first and foremost as, you know, the tastiness of it or what it can give to us, we’ve missed the meaning of what food represents to us according to the word of God.

The scriptures are quite clear. Here’s what Job says in Job 23:12: “I’ve not departed from the commandment of his lips. I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my necessary food.”

Job was not an idolator. He treasured the words of God’s mouth more than his necessary food. He drew a connection between the food that he ate and the words coming from God’s mouth. This connection is also mentioned in Psalm 63:5-6: “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness. Okay? As with good food. What is marrow and fatness supposed to represent to us? My mouth shall praise you with joyful lips when I remember you on my bed.”

Food is a picture to us of the goodness of God and the tastiness and goodness of his word. Psalm 119:103: “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” See the correlation? Over and over in the scriptures is the connection between food and the word of God and Christ and God himself.

When we take food today, God reminds us: don’t be idolatrous when you eat your normal food. You know, you’re supposed to understand that ultimately it represents to you the value of God, the value of his word, and the value of the Savior. Again, in Jeremiah 15:16: “Your words were found, and I ate them.” Very direct correlation. “I ate your words. Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart.”

Jesus says that his joy is to do the Father’s will. And here Jeremiah says it was joy and rejoicing to my heart to eat not some great tasty thing but to eat rather the most tasty thing, which is the word of God. Okay. So the disciples, you know, they’re not idolators here. I’m not trying to say that. But they are on the verge of idolatry. They’re being portrayed for us as those who may be understanding food in its ultimate sense as being what we eat and taste and that kind of stuff, as opposed to making these scriptural connections to what food represents to us. That’s idolatry.

Idolatry is to take any created thing that’s been given to us out of the goodness of God and to somehow live our lives for that as opposed to seeing in that the picture of the value of God that lies behind that. Greed is to value gold more than God.

Now the other ditch of the road is to say that gold has no value. Gold has great value. Food is good. Wine is good. Things that are tasty are good. One ditch would be to say food is a bad thing. Food isn’t bad, but it’s bad when we use it improperly in an idolatrous sense and we live to eat instead of living to have relationship with Christ, which the food is a picture of.

Ecclesiastes 10:16-17 sort of puts this in a way that we can think of. “Woe to you, oh land, when thy king is a child and thy princes eat in the morning.” So woe to you when the princes eat in the morning. Well, you say, “Well, we do. We eat in the morning.” And then it goes on to say, “Blessed art thou, oh land, when thy king is like the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season for strength and not for drunkenness.”

You see, little children when they’re hungry, they’re hungry. They got to get fed. When a three-year-old rolls out of bed, if you don’t feed them right away, they’re going to kind of have problems. But we’re supposed to mature so that when we roll out of bed, the first thing we think of is not food. If we’re driven by our physical appetites in that way, woe to that land.

Now we’ve had a president prior to this president who was driven by physical appetites. And those physical appetites included other things that, you know, became known to the nation. A man who gets up in the morning and his first thoughts are not eating for strength, are not the proper use of God’s good gifts, but rather it’s an idolatrous use. They eat for drunkenness.

So children, I would urge you to think about this. How can you become more like Jesus? Well, you can become more like Jesus when you get up in the morning. Don’t think about food first thing. Understand that food is given to you ultimately for strength for the task that God has given to you. So God wants you to mature. He wants you to grow up. And part of growing up is eating what’s set before you without complaining. And it’s eating in due season when your parents say it’s time to eat. That is a major part of maturing little children into young princes, at least according to Ecclesiastes 10:16-17.

What’s more important to you, children? Food or work? Honestly, what’s more important to you? What do you want more than something else—food or work? Both have four letters. Put whatever is true of you in the box or whatever maybe what you want to be true of you.

If we value food more than God, his word, or his work, that is idolatry. Idolatry is valuing something more than God. And I put on the children’s outline that I think one way to think of idolatry is by looking at its opposite. The opposite of idolatry is holiness—holiness, consecrating everything for the purposes of the king.

So the disciples are tempted to idolatry. But the Savior’s fuel and holiness, then in opposition to idolatry, he tells us about in the next few verses. Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

Okay, so here’s true food of the Lord Jesus Christ. And if we’re made in his image and we are Christians and we want to ask what should our true food be, he’s going to tell us here. And he’s saying that our true food should be our work. Our work. The callings that God has given to us.

It’s interesting in Genesis 24:33. We’ve talked about these well scenes, right? And in Genesis 24:33, Abraham’s servant is securing a wife for Isaac. In verse 33, he said, “Food was set before him to eat, but he said, ‘I will not eat until I have told about my errand.’” And he said, “Speak on.” Okay, so it’s very similar to here. Abraham’s servant, securing a bride for Isaac, won’t eat until he gets about his work. And Jesus comes to this well and he won’t eat until he does the work that God has given him to do.

And even more than that, he just doesn’t say well, I’ll eat in due time. He says my eating, my very food and fuel, is to do the will of God in heaven, to do the will of the Father.

You know, it’s the first temptation that Jesus faces in the wilderness in Matthew 4 is to be tempted to turn rocks into bread. Satan says, “If you’re the son of God, command that these stones become bread.” He’d been fasting 40 days. He was pretty hungry. But he answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”

This isn’t a small deal. This is a big deal to get a proper perspective of food in relationship to the work that God has called us to do. Jesus’s food, he makes it quite explicit. His fuel is to do the Father’s will. To do the Father’s will.

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” Psalm 40:8: “I delight to do your will, oh my God. Your law is within my heart.”

“It’s more blessed to give than to receive.” Notice that the woman—I mean, I know it’s maybe not quite explicit here—but she forgets about water, doesn’t she? She leaves her water pot at the well. She was going to get the water pot filled, get drinks, take people back drinks. She leaves it at the well. She forgets water for the sake of her work, to speak with joy about what’s happened to her and about Jesus being at the well.

And Jesus doesn’t consider food, bread, but instead he’s motivated by the greatness of the harvest that God is beginning to affect in Samaria. So our Jesus, our Savior, tells us that our food is to do the Father’s will, and that Father’s will is acts of benevolence.

So you know, some people said, “Do you eat to work or do you work to eat? Do you go to your job, men, for the purpose of getting enough money to eat, or do you eat to get strength to go to work?” Obviously, the biblical way of thinking of that is a little of both, but primarily your food is strength to do your work.

Jesus places a priority here on work. But you know, he doesn’t even say that really. What he says is he works in order to work. He says that my food, my fuel, what energizes me, gives me strength, is the very work that the Father has given me to do.

A Christian church should be characterized as men and women who are diligent in their labors. A Protestant work ethic flows right out of this text. We are to highly value the very work that God has given us to do and to see it as much more of a priority than the tasting of food and the drinking of water.

One commentator put it this way: “The Savior then declares an explanation of the perplexity to his disciples—that to do the will of God is food to him. That is, it discharges the same offices as food. One, it was an enjoyment. We like food. It’s an enjoyable thing. We should joy in our work. Secondly, he longed for it as the hungry long for food. He wanted work to do. See, he values it the way that the hungry long for food. He longs for the labor that God had called him to do. Third, it refreshed and strengthened him. This is always true of doing the will of God. The character of his service is such that the faithful delight in it. The faithful are made better and stronger by it all the time. His work does not weary but refreshes the soul of the Christian. That’s who we are called to be as Christians—those who have a high estimation of work.”

The very earthly ministry of the Savior is represented by this evangelist as obedience in action, which leads him finally to the surrender of himself in death. Jesus’s food was to work. Children, you are given jobs at home. I hope, I pray, that you are. And we all should have chores to do at home. Children, your food should be to work diligently because that’s what the Savior does.

Men, when you go to work, your job should be to work diligently because that’s the model of the Savior. This was his vocation. You’ve got your holy calling as you go off to the workplace tomorrow morning. All right? It’s your holy calling. And you should enter into that work and see that work as more delightful, more strengthening, more to be desired than food itself that God gives you, which is delightful to be desired and does strengthen us. But in terms of relative value, we must properly and highly estimate work.

And women, your job tomorrow when you get up, whatever it might be—to homeschool your children, maybe some of you go to a job outside of the home, doing the task of beautifying the home. Whatever it is, your vocation and calling tomorrow is something you should enter into very diligently.

But diligence isn’t all that the Savior says about his work. He doesn’t just do the job diligently with great joy in it. He finishes his desire. His food is to finish the work that the Father has assigned to him. He says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

Christians should be finishers of whatever task it is that God has called us to do. We don’t work hard and then tail off at the end of the job and not complete it to its end. We want to be finishers of what God has called us to do. Finishers. Jesus, his very food was to finish the work.

In John 17:4, we read, in his high priestly prayer he says, “I have glorified you on the earth. I have finished the work which you have given me to do.” Now he’s speaking, you know, of his coming death. We know that on the cross in John 19:30, he says, “It is finished.” And then bowing his head, he sends forth his spirit. That is another rendering of that text in the Greek. Instead of just giving up his spirit, dying, the implication is that he gives his spirit out as a result of his finished work.

Well, when we go to our death, what should be on our lips is “Jesus, Father in heaven, we have finished the work that you have called us to do.” And I don’t know what that work is for each and every one of you, but whatever the task is that your parents give you to do, that your husband gives you to do, that your boss gives you to do, that a member in the church, your deacons give you to do, your elders give you to do, whatever the task is that God has assigned for you, you should do it diligently regarding it as more important to you than food. And you should do it to its complete end. We should be finishers. We should be diligent people, and we should be finishers in the context of this truth.

In Acts 16, the reason the reference is there is that it’s the Philippian jailer who comes to salvation and then after all that is done and he’s baptized, his family is baptized, and then he sets food before them and rejoiced having believed with God, with all his household.

Food is good. But food culminates work that we’re given to do. We work to the end, then, that we enter into those delightful labors of eating. We should finish, then, children.

Question number nine: Whatever work God calls us to do. Nehemiah 8:10 says that the joy of the Lord is our strength. And now this could be seen as should be our strength as well. If it’s not to you, understand that the word of God tells you that if you’re a Christian, that tells me that I can say constantly about you and myself that the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Now we may not be appropriating the joy of the Lord as our strength. We might think that food is our strength or a timeline is our strength or whatever it is. But the scriptures tell us that the Lord Jesus Christ joined in the work that he was given to do. And your joy in the work that God has called you to do is your strength as well.

So the scriptures tell us to be workers and to be finishers of the work that God has called us to do. What’s your food then? That’s the question here. What’s your food? What do you delight to do? Is it eat, drink, be merry—good things in their proper place? But has it become idolatrous to you? Does the sensual pleasures that God has given to us have they distracted you from the work God has called you to do? What is the work that you specifically have been given to do by God?

I know in general what the work of every child is. You’re supposed to be a Levitical priest, right? Didn’t James B. Jordan teach us that a couple years ago? What is he talking about? Well, what does the priest do? The priest, the beginning of the offices of maturation. The priest simply does what he’s told to do. Aaron and all his sons, they’re not making things up. They’re not thinking about nothing really. Well, they meditate on what they’re doing. But they basically said, “Now put the animal here. Now do this. Now do this. Then take out the kidneys. Put them here. Put this thing here. Yada yada yada. Everything spelled out.”

Children, that’s your work: to obey the commandments of your parents. Yeah, you don’t have to put the mind totally out of gear. You should be thinking about them maybe. But it’s not your job as a child, okay? As a pre-puberty person, it’s not your job to question everything your parents tell you to do. Your job, your work that you should delight in more than necessary food, is to hear what mom and dad have to say and do it just like they’ve told you to do it, not try to figure out a better way.

Then when you get to after puberty, things start to change and your job changes a little bit. You become more, you know, like a king or a prophet, and you begin to enter into some of those things and dialogue respectfully with your parents about assigned tasks and other ways to do them.

Parents, we can mess up either way, right? We can either not give our children the clear instructions as children—priest-like instructions, Levitical instructions—and so we can encourage them to be improperly thinking about things that are way beyond them. Or we can treat our teenagers like they’re pre-puberty kids: “Just want obedience to everything we tell you to do. Never ask me about anything and don’t talk to me about it. When you get to be a dad, then you can make the decisions. Right now, it’s my decision.”

You see, that’s really not finishing the work that God has called us to do as dads. God has called us to take priests and make kings and prophets out of them. You see, and it’s good to be diligent about that. It’s good to think about it every day. “Hey, dads,” and to apply yourself to it, but it’s not enough to just sort of end at the priest stage with simple obedience. Your job is to move your children to maturity. That’s a big part of your work.

So I’ve gotten a little off track here, but the point is: what is your work? Children, I know what your basic line of work is. Dads, I know what your food is. The work that God has given you to do. You know, it’s interesting. You’ve heard the story, I’m sure, about John Knox. We’re coming up to Reformation times. You know, the story is that he was old, decrepit. He’d be a little shriveled up man, you know, up front. And then he’d go forward to give his sermon. And with every step closer he got to the pulpit, and then with the words he began to speak, his stature would grow. He would straighten up. He would be energized for what God had called him to do. And by the end of the sermon, he’d be hitting the pulpit so hard they were afraid he would break it into pieces.

You see, John Knox’s strength was to do the work that God had called him to do and to finish it, not to retire, but to finish the work that God had called him to do. And in doing that work and in finishing that work, he found strength.

Wilberforce, you know, the guy that lobbied the English Parliament for years and finally got slavery outlawed in England. Wilberforce, the Christian, you know, they were said of Wilberforce that a minnow became a whale in the context of his talks about slavery and the need to repeal it because biblically it was very much of a sin.

A minnow becomes a whale. If you put the food that God has given to you—if you see as your true food the work that God has called you to do—you too can move from being a minnow to a whale, from being enervated and weak to becoming strong to do the things that God has called you to do.

So God wants us to recognize that he moves us from being outcasts to being part of his team of saving the world. And he wants us to recognize that when that happens, we’re to become like Jesus and see our true food as doing the will of the Father in heaven, and not just working diligently but to finish a task.

And now in the third part of this text, I think in verses 35 to 38, he wants us to see that this happens in the context of community. Our work and our labors occur in the context of community. It’s white for harvest.

He says, entering into the labor of others. White for harvest. Now is the time to work. Jesus says, “Do you say there are still four months and then comes the harvest? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes. Look at the fields, for they’re already white for harvest.”

Now this doesn’t mean—I don’t think we can absolutize this text and say that it’s always white for harvest. I mean, the scriptures tell us, for instance, in Mark 4:28, “The earth yields crops by itself. First the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head.” One of R.J. Rushdoony’s favorite verses. Always calling for patience in the context of American Christianity. Wait for the development of the kingdom. That’s what’s being described here by our Savior. It’s like watching a, you know, a corn plant grow up or wheat plant rather grow up. You know, there’s a progression to it.

So our Savior isn’t saying that’s not true. But what he was saying is right now Samaria is being evangelized. Now the fields are white for harvest. Now is the time to work. And so he calls the Savior to—his people rather. The Savior calls his people into this diligent labor because right now, he says, is the time to gather this harvest up. We’re not just going to come here, plant the word, and come back four months later. The word has been planted, but it has taken root immediately and grown up to a full harvest, and we must now harvest that work.

He says, so Jesus says that now is the time to harvest, particularly speaking of them. I think that Isaiah 49:18-20 might be behind this text. Let me read it for you. Isaiah 49, it’s on your outline.

“Lift up your eyes, Isaiah says, look around and see all these gather together and come to you. As I live, says the Lord, you shall surely clothe yourselves with them as an ornament, and bind them on you as a bride does. For your waste in desolate places and the land of your destruction will even now be too small for the inhabitants, and those who swallowed you up will be far away. The children you will have after you have lost the others will say again in your ears, ‘The place is too small for me. Give me a place where I may dwell.’”

There’s a reversal that Isaiah speaks of from being cursed and abandoned and chastened. God brings his people back. And when he brings them back, he adds to them other people.