Will You Give Me a Drink?

[0:00] We hope that you enjoy this teaching from Christ Church. This material is copyrighted and no unauthorized duplication, redistribution, or any other use of any part is permitted without prior consent from Christ Church.

[0:15] Please consider donating to this work in the San Francisco Bay Area online at ChristChurchEastBay.org. A reading from the Gospel of John, chapter 4, verses 5 to 29 and 39 to 42 as printed in the liturgy.

[0:38] So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well.

[0:53] It was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, Give me a drink. For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.

[1:08] The Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

[1:20] Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

[1:32] The woman said to him, Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob?

[1:45] He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock. Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.

[2:05] The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.

[2:21] Jesus said to her, Go call your husband and come here. The woman answered him, I have no husband.

[2:33] Jesus said to her, You are right in saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.

[2:46] The woman said to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.

[3:01] Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know.

[3:13] We worship what we know. For salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.

[3:26] For the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming, he who is called Christ.

[3:43] When he comes, he will tell us all things. Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am he. Just then his disciples came back.

[3:54] They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, what do you seek or why are you talking with her? So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, come see a man who told me all that I ever did.

[4:11] Can this be the Christ? Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony. He told me all that I ever did.

[4:21] So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, it is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.

[4:45] This is the gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord God. Thank you for that scripture reading, Terry, and good morning, Christ Church.

[5:01] My name is Andrew. I'm one of the pastors here. I missed you last week. Not that much, though, because I got to sit in a cabin and eat popcorn and throw snowballs at the youth and teach them about Jesus and the church, and it was a really good time.

[5:15] Why don't I open us up in prayer, then we'll dive into God's word this morning. Father, we want to declare with the Samaritans in this village that indeed, this is the Savior of the world.

[5:32] Would we dive into the depths of what it means that you are the Savior of the world, what it means that you are the Savior of this Samaritan woman? Would we be amazed, God, at the way that you deal with us, at the way that you have chosen to be our God among us?

[5:51] So be honored in the preaching of your word, and we pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen. So we're continuing our series in the Gospel of John. We're now in chapter four. We're at the famous story of the woman at the well, Jesus and the woman at the well.

[6:06] And, you know, this is actually not the first time I've ever preached this text. The first time was maybe six to eight years ago. I was a seminary student in Philly at Westminster Seminary, and I tried looking for my old manuscript, my old audio recording, but I couldn't find it.

[6:22] And I was really disappointed because I had to start over all over again. But, you know, maybe it's for the best because while I remember being super excited as this young, aspiring pastor preaching this, you know, famous text about Jesus and the woman at the well, I also remember the sermon bombing pretty bad in northeast Philadelphia.

[6:41] Sorry to those folks. As in, it was definitely not the bomb, all right? It was one of those sermons where I came to church that Sunday, like, oh man, I'm not feeling this.

[6:53] I don't got it today. I mean, I feel like that most of the time here at Christ Church, but especially that Sunday, I was like, mm-mm. And the people, they knew. They were struggling.

[7:04] So hopefully it'll be better this time. I can't make any promises. But yeah, I went away from preaching this passage not feeling like I did it justice. And then came this week.

[7:17] And it was, it was like just as hard. It was just as surprisingly difficult to figure out how to preach this text. But I think this time around, I've kind of come to understand why this text is a little bit difficult to preach.

[7:29] It's a pretty long one. It's got tons of details. It's overflowing with so many themes that you could pick to preach on. You could preach Jesus, the healer of racial and ethnic cultural conflict.

[7:41] Jesus, the uplifter of women and the outcast. Jesus, the living water that satisfies everyone's thirst. Jesus as a model for how to share the truth about the Christ.

[7:51] You could preach on Jesus in sex or marriage or singleness or on worship in spirit and in truth. There are a lot of ways that you could go with this text, John chapter 4. But I think what makes this passage really, really difficult, especially to preach in 25 to 30 minutes, is this kind of complicated dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well.

[8:14] It's got some really, really strange twists and turns, some really weird transitions throughout the conversation. I think about it. It goes from a conversation about water to living water to husbands and then to prophets, right?

[8:29] And then to mountains and then they talk about worship and then they talk about the end times. And then all of a sudden Jesus says, I am the Messiah. And she's leaving her water jug there going into the city and telling everyone, come see a man who told me all that I ever did.

[8:43] Thus saith the Lord, right? That's it. That's it. It's strange, right? Well, what I want to do today is I want to try to help us make sense of all these twists and turns in the story because I'm really convinced, I'm really convinced that if we can understand why, after this strange conversation with Jesus, why this woman all of a sudden leaves her water jug behind and goes back into the town and tells people to come and see a man who told her all that she ever did, I think if we can understand why she responded in this way to this encounter with Jesus, I think we'll get a wonderful glimpse of the heart of God and the goodness of the good news about Jesus.

[9:22] I think we'll get a sense of the pursuing love of the Father. We'll get a sense of the costly grace of the Son and of this communal fellowship of the Holy Spirit that He wants for us. A love, a grace, and a fellowship that free us and fill us to be the people, to live the lives we've always wanted to live.

[9:39] To live the lives that God has always wanted us to live. So are we ready to dive in? We don't have a lot of stories today. This is the story. Jesus and the woman at the well, right?

[9:50] Let's start at verse 5. You're going to want to have your printed text in front of you, your liturgy, because we're going to be looking down at this text a lot. Let's start with verse 5. So he, Jesus, came to a town of Samaria called Sikar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.

[10:07] Jacob's well was there, so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. Tons of things we could talk about here, but I want to talk about Samaria.

[10:18] What is Samaria? If you know nothing about Samaria, if you know nothing about the Samaritans and their relationship with Jesus' people, the Jewish people, what you need to know is that the relationship between the Jewish people and the Samaritans was incredibly hostile, and it had been for centuries.

[10:36] All right? Shortly after the death of King David's son, King Solomon, after the building of the temple, there was a civil war between the north of Israel and the south of Israel. And the south of Israel had its capital in Jerusalem, and the north of Israel had its capital in Samaria.

[10:53] And what you need to know about the history of Israel is that, while the southern kingdom, they did have a few good kings, the northern kingdom had all terrible kings, all kings who went their own way, did not follow the way of God.

[11:08] And then, eventually, for their own political ends, they set up their own place of worship outside of Jerusalem, away from the temple that God had told Israel to build.

[11:19] Like, now we're going to do our own thing. All right? So you can imagine, like, in the eyes of the southern Jewish people, how blasphemous this would have been. And then, to make matters worse, when the Assyrians came from the north and the east to come, and they first conquered the north, they first conquered Samaria, shortly after that, the northerners, they began to intermarry with these foreigners from the north and the east of Assyria, and they began to intermarry with people who did not worship Yahweh.

[11:48] And so the religion became even more impure, and you can imagine the hostility and the division between the Jewish people and the Samaritans growing and growing and growing over the centuries.

[11:59] In 110 BC, there's a Jewish king who comes up and actually destroys this sacrilegious temple in Samaria. And then you have another story of maybe six, I think it's six in the common era, where there are some Samaritans who sneak into Jerusalem.

[12:16] They sneak into the Jerusalem temple, and they defile it. They scatter human bones in it and make it unclean. There's just tons of animosity, tons of back and forth. But this is the history between the Jewish people and the Samaritans.

[12:29] They hated each other. To the average Jewish person, the Samaritan was a half-breed, an impure person with an impure religion. And to the Samaritans, the Jewish people were their judgmental relatives, the ones who rejected them and saw them as inferior and unfaithful and unworthy of association and utterly separated from God, even though they claimed Abraham as their father too.

[12:52] Now look down with me at verse 7. This is the history between the Jews and the Samaritans. Then verse 7, enter a Samaritan woman who's come to draw water. And this is where things really start to get interesting, because what was she doing all alone at the sixth hour at high noon drawing water from this well?

[13:14] Normally this was supposed to be a communal chore, a communal activity, the drawing of water, with all the other women in the town, and certainly not at the hottest time of the day.

[13:24] This was supposed to be a communal group chore done in the cool of the morning or in the cool of the evening. But here she is. She's all alone in the heat of the day. Something's up with this loner of a woman.

[13:38] And as the text unfolds in verse 18, that this woman is doing her chores in the heat of the day and in lonely isolation probably has something to do with the fact that she has a past.

[13:49] She has a past. She's had five husbands and is now with a man who isn't her husband. She's probably a despised social outcast. And yet, in spite of Jesus and this woman's weariness in the heat of the day, in spite of their people's centuries of ethnic hostility, and in spite of the patriarchal society that they lived in, in spite of the fact that Jesus knew everything about this woman's past, in spite of the fact that he was a Jewish rabbi, right, who if he was seen speaking to such a woman, it would jeopardize his reputation.

[14:21] In spite of all these factors, the most unlikely of conversations ensues between Jesus and this forsaken outcast of a woman.

[14:31] And thus begins the longest recorded one-on-one personal encounter with Jesus in all the gospel accounts. It's with this woman, of all people, the Samaritan woman at the well.

[14:43] It's a conversation between the Son of God and an unnamed outcast Samaritan woman. A conversation in which a righteous, faithful, and pure Jewish rabbi is willing to take an unclean Samaritan woman's cup and put it to his lips for a drink.

[14:59] It's a conversation in which the holy creator of the universe is willing to ask this destitute woman for a favor, for a drink. This is our God. This is Jesus.

[15:12] Now, the Samaritan woman is just as astounded as any Jewish person would be that Jesus has initiated a conversation with her and that he's even cool with drinking from her water jar.

[15:25] She's very aware of and even bound by the social conventions, the social norms that Jesus had just breached. And she says in verse 9, How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?

[15:41] For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. She's saying, Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am? And how can you ask such a favor from me? But Jesus says in verse 10, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him.

[15:59] And he would have given you living water. He's saying, Oh, I know who I am. And if you only knew who I was too. If you only knew. You think it's crazy that I, a male Jewish rabbi, am asking you, a Samaritan, for a drink of water?

[16:17] I got something crazier for you, he says to her. I got something crazier for you. I can give you for free. You only need to ask. I can give you living water. Welling up to eternal life, a gift from God himself.

[16:29] And at this point, the woman thinks Jesus is just talking about some kind of running water maybe, some other source. And she meets Jesus with skepticism. Verse 11, Sir, you have nothing to draw water with.

[16:43] And the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself as did his sons and his livestock. She's like, Look, our forefather Jacob gave us this well.

[16:58] And here you are asking me for a drink. Bro, you don't even have a bucket. You don't even have a bucket. What are you talking about, man? But Jesus challenges her. Verse 13, Everyone who drinks of this water that Jacob dug up for you will be thirsty again.

[17:17] But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring. A spring of water welling up to eternal life.

[17:29] And at this point, the skeptical Samaritan woman is just like, All right, sure. Sounds great. Verse 15, Sir, give me this water then so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to drink water.

[17:40] That sounds good. If you really have that kind of living water that can forever quench my thirst, sure, I'll take some of that. I'll take some of that. And this is where things get really confusing.

[17:51] Right? She says, Yes, I like this living water that you're offering, but I kind of don't believe that you have because you don't even have a bucket. And then in verse 16, Jesus says, Go call your husband and come here.

[18:03] Like, what is going on in this conversation? They were just talking about water and the lack of buckets and all of a sudden, we're talking about, Go call your husband and bring him here. How in the world did this conversation go from living water to a husband?

[18:18] Is Jesus just completely changing the subject? Well, I think the answer becomes clearer if we follow the dialogue further. She says in verse 17, Look with me. I have no husband.

[18:31] She indulges this change of subject. She says, I have no husband. And Jesus says, You are right, saying I have no husband. For you have had five husbands and the one you now have is not your husband.

[18:44] What you have said is true. What's going on here? How did it get to this? Well, I think Jesus is doing, what he's doing here is that he's revealing to this woman her deepest thirst.

[18:57] Her deepest thirst. Jesus is saying, If you want living water, something that can forever quench your every thirst and turn you into a life-giving spring, welling up to eternal life for yourself and for others, you have got to come to terms, not just with your thirst for this well water.

[19:19] You have got to come to terms with your deepest thirst. And for this woman, it had to do with something with her past. Having had five husbands and now having a man who was not her husband.

[19:33] And you know, I don't want to judge or make too many assumptions about this woman. I think a lot of preachers and commentators can easily do that. We don't know the stories behind the first five husbands in this woman's life.

[19:44] Maybe they all divorced her each time for reasons out of her control. Maybe some of them passed away. Or maybe she really was unfaithful. To some of them, maybe to all of them, maybe she was shamefully promiscuous.

[19:58] We don't know. But what we can know is that her life is not at all what she had intended or wanted, right? We can know that at least. No one gets married planning to have four more spouses in their lifetime.

[20:11] No one gets married planning to end up with someone who isn't their spouse. And we can also know that her relationship with this six man at least who isn't her husband, it's not what God wants for her.

[20:23] Right? A sexual relationship relating to another person as a spouse who is not actually your spouse. This is not God's will or design for her or for any of us. And I think John Piper was so right in his sermon on this passage when he said that no one goes through five marriages and an additional extramarital relationship without either starting thirsty or ending thirsty.

[20:46] And Jesus was prophetically revealing this truth to her. You've got a thirst and it has to do with this past of yours with these five men and now this six men.

[20:58] Her pursuit of a husband and probably a happy home and a marriage and whatever supposedly normative status and lifestyle that came with such things, a pursuit not so unlike many of ours, it left her thirsty.

[21:11] It'll leave us thirsty too if we don't watch out. And now with this six men who is not her husband or maybe we could read it as who is not her husband, maybe he's someone else's husband, she's worse off than when she'd begun, thirstier than she's ever been in more ways than one at Jacob's famous well at high noon.

[21:34] She's here at this well, she thinks she's gonna satisfy some kind of thirst, but Jesus shows her you are so much thirstier than you even know. And you know, a lot of commentaries and preachers think that this woman tries to change the subject away from her sex life.

[21:52] They think that she's trying to move the conversation to something maybe more superficial, more intellectual, more theological, like talking to a prophet about something he might be interested in.

[22:03] But I wanna follow the commentators Leslie Newbigin and Herman Ritterbos because I think something else is happening here when she responds to Jesus' intimate knowledge about her five husbands and her current partner.

[22:15] Look with me at verse 19. In verse 19, when she says, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.

[22:29] I don't think, actually, that she's trying to deflect Jesus' prophetic words into her life. I think she's actually beginning to acknowledge who Jesus is.

[22:41] You're a prophet. What is a prophet? I think a lot of times we think of a prophet as someone who makes predictions, but most properly, a prophet is someone who speaks the words of God and opens people's eyes to their waywardness.

[22:54] A prophet is someone who calls people back into right relationship with God. After all, isn't she trying to if she's trying to divert Jesus into another topic, seems like she would have been successful because Jesus goes on with this topic, right?

[23:10] But I think what's really going on here is that she has received the prophetic words of Jesus about her deviation from God in her sex life. And recognizing that Jesus is at least someone who speaks the words of God, she is now bringing to him a genuine concern that she now has.

[23:27] And this is the concern. She says, All right, you're right. I've been unfaithful to Yahweh. I've been unfaithful to the Torah. I've been with this man who is not my husband.

[23:38] But now, this is problematic for me, Mr. Prophet. This divide between us Samaritans who worship here and you Jewish people who worship in Jerusalem, well, that's a huge, huge problem for me now.

[23:52] Look, Mr. Prophet, I'm already an outcast here in Samaria. They won't even let me worship and offer sacrifices to atone for my sins here on Mount Gerizim. But if you are right and the right place to worship is where the Jewish people say in Jerusalem, well, how could I, of all people, ever deal with my sin?

[24:15] I must be hopeless if you are right. And at this point, all hope seems lost for this woman at the well. But the good news of the gospel is that with Jesus, there is always hope for Jesus is not only the prophet who reveals our waywardness, but he is a prophet who shows us the way, the way to life, the way to living water, the way back to God.

[24:40] He is himself the very way, the very truth, and the very life, and no one comes to the Father except through him. Listen to what he says to her. He doesn't shrug and say, it's okay, as long as you're sincere and you mean well, you're close enough, just have a good spirit about it, and you'll be accepted as a true worshiper of God.

[24:58] He's honest. Verse 22, he says, you worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews. Yes, the Samaritan religion is a deviation from the truth.

[25:11] But he says in verse 21, believe me though, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. Verse 23, the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father by the Spirit and the truth for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

[25:33] Do you realize what Jesus is saying to her right here? This is the gospel. This is the gospel. Confronted by her sin with some man who is not her own husband, she sees the wide chasm between God whose temple is in Jerusalem and herself as an immoral, outcasted, Samaritan woman and yet here Jesus is saying to her, the hour is coming and is now here because I'm here, because God is among you, because the true temple is here, I am the true temple and true worshipers will worship the Father not by their own effort, not by figuring out a way to sneak into Jerusalem as a Samaritan to offer right sacrifices, but the way to be in right relationship with God as a true worshiper, Jesus says, is by the Spirit and by the truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him.

[26:24] Jesus is saying, you're right, the chasm is far too wide for you to cross the gap on your own, but through the Spirit's power and through me, the truth, and because the Father is the one actively seeking and pursuing worshippers, there is a way to be right with God once again, apart from your insufficiencies and despite your insurmountable obstacles, it's by the Spirit, it's by the truth and by the ever-seeking Father, the pursuing Father.

[26:58] And as this woman hears the good news of this hour that is coming when she will actually be able to worship and be restored into a right relationship with Yahweh by His Spirit and His truth, she can't wait.

[27:11] Wouldn't you believe that to be good news for you? She cannot wait for that hour to come and she says in verse 25, I know that Messiah is coming, He who is called Christ.

[27:23] When He comes, He will tell us all things. I can't wait. And yet to her surprise and to her delight, Jesus says to her in verse 26, literally in the Greek, ego emi, I am.

[27:39] His very first statement, I am the one speaking to you, I am He. I am the Messiah that you're longing for. And this changes everything for the woman.

[27:51] This changes everything for her. And she leaves her water jug behind and she returns to her town and she invites everyone in the city to come and see a man who told her everything that she had ever done.

[28:03] And I want to wrap up now by highlighting this incredible response of hers and I want to talk about what prompted this response and then how this is relevant for us. Now check it out in verse 28, how she leaves her water jug behind with Jesus.

[28:17] She just leaves it behind, leaves it right there with Him at the well. I want you to imagine her love-hate relationship with that jug of water before she met Jesus.

[28:29] On the one hand, it's the very instrument that she daily depended upon to secure her own survival and to quench her thirst again and again and again. She can't live without it.

[28:41] And yet on the other hand, she daily strains herself to carry that heavy jug back and forth by the sweat of her own brow, wishing she never had to draw water with it ever again, wishing for an eternal spring instead.

[28:56] Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like our lives, the paradoxical relationship, right, between the exhausting grind of life we seek freedom from, but also our dependence upon the grind for our survival and meaning?

[29:13] Maybe we're not so different from the Samaritan woman, are we? Laboring day after day to quench our thirst, believing the lie that Jacob's well and her water jug were the best shot that she had at survival, the best shot that she had at somewhat quenching her thirst.

[29:31] Until boom, right, she meets Jesus and her relationship to the well and her relationship to that jug of water are completely transformed. And she isn't thirsty like she was before.

[29:43] I also want us to notice how she runs not away, she doesn't run away from the town, but she runs toward the very town in which she was an outcast of promiscuous repute.

[29:55] this woman who approached the well as an ashamed loner is now running toward people. And this woman who has had five husbands and is most recently with a man who is not her husband is now openly telling people in verse 29, come and see a man who told me all that I ever did.

[30:15] Who would do that? Especially with a past like hers. Who would highlight that? Who would broadcast that? Come and see a man who told me how much of an adulterer I was.

[30:27] How immoral I am. How much of a sexually perverse deviant I am. Someone asked the question, what was it about this woman's encounter with Jesus that led to such an incredible response?

[30:41] Well in short, I think she found, I think it's that she found the man she'd always needed but never knew to seek. Never knew she even wanted. When she looked to quench her thirst with man after man through marriage and sex and maybe domestic dreams, Jesus said, all you need is me.

[31:01] All you need is me, the living water. You don't need this well. You don't need that water jug. You don't need these other men. All you need is me. Is that a word for some of us today from Jesus to us that all you need is me?

[31:15] Because see in Jesus, she found a man who loved her like she'd never been loved before. Like she'd never been loved before. A man who though he had every reason not to speak to her, every reason not to enter into a relationship with her, she found a man who wanted to give her a free gift.

[31:33] She would just ask. Right? Verse 10, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have just asked him and he would have given you living water. This is the gospel. It's free.

[31:44] You just ask and he wants to give it to you. She found a man who loved her unconditionally. A man who knew her to the bottom and loved her to the heavens. A Jewish man who though, knowing everything she ever did, still wanted to talk to her.

[31:59] Still wanted to give her living water for free. Still believed that she could be in right relationship with God as a true worshiper. Still told her that she was worth pursuing and not without hope and that she was even able to be filled with the spirit and presence and power of God.

[32:13] That God had a plan for this woman to make her a spring of life-giving water even for others. In Jesus, she found a security and a steadfast love unlike any she'd ever experienced.

[32:29] And all of a sudden, she was freed. She was freed from the judgmental opinions of others toward her. Who cares what the townspeople think if I have the steadfast love of God?

[32:40] That's how she could run back into this city. Come and see a man who told me all that I ever did and still loved me with all that he is.

[32:54] And still included me. And still wanted to be my savior, my Messiah. Do we understand the liberating power of Jesus?

[33:06] The freedom of this gospel that is preached here by the church. That the good news that we don't need what we think we need and that the living water of eternal life is completely free for whoever simply asks.

[33:22] That this good news that we can be both fully known in all of our sin and fully loved by God's abundant grace. This good news that even when we are running away, the Father is seeking those who will worship him.

[33:38] The good news is that we cannot outrun his spirit or render false his truth in Christ. Christ's church, do we really understand this liberating gospel of Jesus?

[33:50] Can we, with the same enthusiasm of this woman at the well, can we invite and call others with the same vulnerability and confidence, the same humility and boldness, can we approach our friends and our family and our colleagues and our neighbors saying, come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.

[34:09] Come and see a man who knows about my porn addiction. Come and see a man who knows about my aberrant sexual life, my marital unfaithfulness, my multiple partners and flings and affairs. Come and see a man who knows about my selfish, greedy heart and habits, how I use my time and how I use my money.

[34:25] Come and see a man who knows all the hatred and contempt in my heart for my spouse, my boss, my parent, this or that kind of person. Come and see a man who knows the deepest, darkest secrets of my past.

[34:38] Like what if the strength of our witness didn't depend on how much we knew or how much we were able to reason and debate and explain our faith like Nicodemus surely was?

[34:49] But what if the strength of our witness has more to do with the magnitude of the forgiveness and the grace poured out upon us in Christ? What if the people in our lives knew even just some of what Christ's blood has atoned for in our lives?

[35:10] What if the millions of people out in our world today who struggle every day with not being enough, with not measuring up, with guilt upon guilt, what if they knew the man who though knowing all that they ever did chose not just to be God among us but a thirsty God among us?

[35:29] A thirsty God among us not just at Jacob's well at the sixth hour but at the sixth hour upon the cross. Would they and would we with them astounded that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor death nor anything else in all of creation could ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?

[35:52] What if they knew that? What if they knew that? That's what we're saying when we say come and see a man who told me all that I ever did. If they knew that if we all knew that would we all not declare along with the rest of the Samaritans from this woman's village in verse 42 that this is indeed this is indeed the Savior not just of the Jews not just of the Samaritan woman not just of you and me as individuals this is the Savior of the world.

[36:25] Let's pray.