Jesus' Conversation with the Samaritan Woman

Well, I'll give you greetings in Jesus' name. It's good to be here this morning again. And I would invite you to turn in your Bibles to the Gospel of John, chapter 4. I'm going to read the first 26 verses.

And this passage is about Jesus and His encounter with the Samaritan woman. And we're looking at living water. We're looking at knowing the hearts of men. And we're looking at spiritual worship, worship that's in spirit and in truth. Those are the three things that Jesus addresses in this passage. So let's read, starting in verse 1. "Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, though Jesus Himself did not baptize but His disciples, He left Judea and departed again to Galilee. But He needed to go through Samaria. So He came to a city of Samaria, which is called Sichar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus, therefore, being weary from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour. A woman of 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. Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, "How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan? For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans." Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is who says to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."

The woman said to Him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with. And the well is deep. Where then do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself as well as his sons and his livestock?" And Jesus answered and said to her, "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again. But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But that water that I shall give him will become to him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life." The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water that I may not thirst nor come here to draw."

Jesus said to her, "Go call your husband and come here." The woman answered and said, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You have well said, I have no husband. For you have had five husbands, and the one whom you have is not your husband in that you spoke truly." The woman said to Him, "Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming. And when you the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father. You worship what you do not know. We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth." The woman said to Him the woman said to Him, "I know that Messiah is coming, who is called Christ.

When He comes, He will tell us all things." Jesus said to her, "I that speak to thee, I am." Now, you may have noticed a few places there where I changed the wording a little bit from the New King James Version. There's a reason I did that, and I'll explain that here in a while.

But I want us to know notice a couple of things before we get into before we go through the passage. I just want to point out some things in the passage that kind of crop up. You'll notice that it says at the very beginning of chapter 4, "Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John." This is the first time that the term Lord is used to refer to Jesus in the Gospel of John. All right?

Before this, He was often referred to as Rabbi. And there are a few more times throughout the Gospel of John in which He is referred to as Rabbi. People address Him as Rabbi. But increasingly, as we go through this Gospel, we will see, particularly on the part of the disciples, them addressing Him as Lord. Now, Lord can have the term Kyrios, which is the term the word that Greek word that's used, is translated in various three major ways. One is simply Lord. One is, like we would say, Sir, or Mister, okay? Or and then it's also used translated sometimes as Master, okay?

In the sense that it's and you'll see that you see that here in this passage. Several times, the woman says to Jesus, "Sir." And that is Kyrios. It's the same term that's used there in verse 1 when it talks about the Lord. And that's a proper way to translate it. You have to read the context and so on. For example, later on in the Gospel, some people come to one of Jesus' disciples, and they address Him as Kyrios, Sir, okay? And they're certainly not meaning there what we mean when we say the Lord, okay? The Lord. And if you remember, as you go through as you have read through the Old Testament, you'll come to places in the Old Testament where it has the word Lord, and it has it in capital letters.

And that is the Hebrew word that is the Hebrew word Adoniah, which means Lord, but is often was often used by the Jews as a substitute for God's proper name, I Am, Yahweh, I Am Who I Am. And for the Jews, that was such a sacred thing that they didn't want to say it. They wouldn't want to speak it aloud because they took very seriously the admission not to use the Lord's name in vain, to be very careful with it. I was I've probably mentioned this before, but I was struck by this about 20-some years ago when the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit was at the Library of Congress. I went to it, and I was tagging along with this group of Jewish people, and they had a really good tour guide, and so I just followed along, listened to what he had to say.

We came up to the scroll of the Psalms, and he pointed out that in the writing or in the lettering that you had Hebrew letters, and then all of a sudden, you came to a word in which the lettering looked different. It was actually an earlier style of Hebrew.

And the scribes did that on purpose because that was Yahweh's name. And that was a visual marker for them to understand that you were coming across the name Yahweh. And in your mind, when you read that passage and it was the passage when people read at that time, they always read aloud. When you read that passage, particularly when you read it in a synagogue, all right, instead of saying Yahweh, you would say the Lord. And so this term, the Lord, is a powerful term. And when we look at it in the context of these people saying the Lord, they're not simply saying the Sir. They're saying the Lord. And I think there's a connection there with Yahweh.

And that is tied in at the end of this passage where, if you look in verse 26, Jesus says to her, "I who speak to you am He." That's how many of our versions render it. But if you notice in your Bibles if your Bible does the thing that I mine does, where if the translators added words to help with what they think helps with the meaning, He is not there.

He's not there. And this could probably more could probably better be translated as I read it to you, "I that speak to thee, I Am. I Am." All right? And one of the things I noticed in this passage is how God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are all involved here.

In verse 23, it says that the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, okay? For the Father is seeking such to worship Him. And so we see God the Father present in this thing. He's the one who is deserving of our worship. He's the one that we address in prayer.

You know, Jesus taught us to pray Our Father, who art in heaven, okay? But I also want you to know something about Jesus here. Not only is He in verse 20 as in verse 26. That is, I think, referencing, pointing out to us His deity, His godhood. But if you notice in verse 6, it says, "Jesus, therefore, being weary from His journey and thus sat thus by the well." Jesus was also a man. And like us, He as elsewhere it says in Scripture, like us, He was a man like us. At the end of the day, after a long walk, He was tired, and He sat down, and He was thirsty. And His disciple and He was hungry.

His disciples went into town to get something to eat to bring out to Him, okay? So in this passage, we see Christ, the I Am, also being Christ, the man, who is tired, who gets tired. He understands that about us, okay? We get tired. We get weary, okay? But even in the midst of His tiredness and His weariness, He has this encounter with the Samaritan woman.

And so it's a lovely encounter. It's a very unusual encounter. If you remember in the last passage we looked at in chapter 3, who was Jesus encountering? He has these conversations. He has these encounters with people. And they and Nicodemus on was came to Jesus at night. He sought Jesus out. This woman wasn't seeking Jesus out. She was about her very normal, everyday task. She was coming to the well to get water, okay? And Jesus took the opportunity of this encounter to speak to her and to offer her a gift, the gift of living water, okay? And so I want to look at this exchange. And at verses 7 through 15, we're going to look at the living water that Jesus is offering.

At in verses 15 through 19, we're going to look at Jesus, the prophet who knows what's in our hearts. And then in verses 20 to the end to verse 26, we're going to look at this worship in the spirit and in truth.

All right? Okay. Let's look then at this living water that Jesus wants to give this woman. Now, if you remember, the Samaritans, there are several instances in the Gospels. This is one in John's Gospel, but there are several instances in the Gospels where we encounter Samaritans. Jesus tells that very well-known parable of the Samaritan who rescued the person who was set upon by thieves and outshone the Pharisee I mean, outshone the priest and the Levite and so on in being a neighbor to the wounded person, the beaten and wounded person.

The Samaritans were a mixed ethnic group, okay? They were a mixed ethnic group. Their history goes back to when the Assyrian Empire conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and carried off many of the people out of Israel into captivity. And the Assyrians had this practice when they conquered a people to uproot them and carry them off and scatter them throughout the empire so that they would not be a cohesive force to rise up in rebellion. It was a very it was a very efficient thing to do. And then at the same time, they would bring people into areas that they had conquered from other places, okay? And so you had some Jewish people who still lived in the northern kingdom, a remnant of them, and then you had these new people being brought in and settled there by the Assyrians, and they mingled.

Now, of course, the new people who were brought in were not God-fearing people. They brought they were heathens. They brought their idols with them. And in the first generations of intermingling where these people of Jewish background and of Gentile or heathen background intermingled and married, there was also a mingling of the religions. And so they continued to worship Yahweh, the one who said, "I Am Who I Am," but they also worshiped these heathen gods. It was sort of a synchronistic kind of thing that happened.

But and as a consequence, okay, as a consequence, the people in Judea, and particularly after the Babylonian captivity, looked askance at these people as being not quite right, okay? Not having the pedigree, the pure-blood Jewish pedigree that the folks in Judea saw themselves as having. And of course, it did not help any that when the children when the Jews, which are the people from Judea, were when the southern kingdom of Judea was destroyed and taken into captivity, they were taken as groups of people and settled. And so 70 years later, when many of them returned back to Judea, they came back as a people. And during that time that they had been in Babylon, God had purged them of their idolatry.

He had it was actually a very spiritually, it was a very powerful thing to happen to them. They never fell back into idolatry again like that, all right? That's where they think the Phariseeism started, this very, very serious attention to obeying the law, okay? And if you remember from Ezra and Nehemiah them coming back into the Promised Land and the temple had been destroyed, they went about building up the walls of Jerusalem because the walls had been destroyed. They began to build the temple because the temple had been destroyed. And you remember there were people who were trying to prevent that. And one of them was Sam Balant, a Samaritan.

The Samaritans did not like what they were seeing, and they actually tried to cause the Jews trouble.

So as you can see, there's not a lot of love lost on either side, okay? There's not a lot of love lost on either side. Now, the interesting thing is, according to Josephus, during the same time or around the same time that the temple was being rebuilt in Jerusalem, Sam Balant had erected a temple on Mount Gerizim. And if you remember, that is the place when Abraham first came into the Promised Land. He erected his first altar and sacrificed unto the Lord.

But it's better known for the place where at Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebel, when the children of Israel came into the Promised Land after the 400 years of being in Egypt, and one of part of them were on Mount Gerizim, and the other part were on Mount Ebel, and the blessings and the curses were pronounced.

And it was at Mount Gerizim that the blessings were pronounced. So this is a place that has a lot of association with Israel's history and God working with Israel. It's in a sense, it's a sacred place. I think and the Samaritans had a sense of that. In fact, I think they would have said, "Jerusalem, what's Jerusalem?" That's something that came along that came along later on. David made it his capital city and so on. But Mount Gerizim was a place God chose. That's where Abraham first came. That's where the blessings were pronounced on our people. To them, it was a holy place. What better place, their argument is, what better place could we have to have God's temple on it?

And so Sam Balant built a temple. But later on, during the reign of the Maccabees, one of the Maccabean kings destroyed that temple around 128 BC. But still, it seems to be a sacred place, all right? The other interesting thing about the Samaritans is that they only recognized the first five books of Moses, what was known as the Torah, as being Scripture: the Psalms, the Prophets, the histories, and so on. They did not consider them to be Scripture, all right?

And so there's this animosity. There's this dispute about where is the proper place to worship. There's this history of a history that has undergirded that. There's a disagreement about what is authoritative Scripture and so on, right? And so it says Jesus had to go through Samaria. He was up in Judea. He was going to Galilee. He had to go through Samaria. He came to a place called Sichar.

And there was a well that Jacob had bought, had dug. It's also thought to be near the place where Joseph, and if you remember that area, Ephraim, Ephraim is one of the half-tribes of Joseph, okay? That whole area was occupied by the tribe of Ephraim, okay? And so it's thought that that's where Joseph's bones were buried as when he was carried out of Egypt when the children returned.

And that all plays into what is happening here. This woman comes out of Sichar. She's coming to this well, and she's coming to get water. And she's brought her bucket. It's a deep well. It's not something you just plunge down in and get out like that. You have to have a bucket. I imagine you have to have a rope. Getting water in this sense was a fairly laborious process, and it was normally something that women did. It was one of their jobs to get and haul the water and carry it in. And she comes there with her bucket, and Jesus says to her, "Give me a drink.

Give me a drink." And she is puzzled, amazed, perhaps astounded. And she says, "How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" All right? Now, the next phrase that comes is in or says, "For the Samaritans have no dealings for the Jews have no dealings with Samaritans."

All right? That is probably not the best translation because if the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans, why did the disciples go into the city of Sichar to buy food?

That sounds like dealings, you know? You're actually using money to buy some things. Well, this falls into some of the peculiarities of the Jewish interpretation of the purity laws, how the Pharisees understood some of these things, okay?

As I looked at this, and most commentators agree that it should be better translated as, "For the Jews use nothing in common with the Samaritans." And that is referring to using utensils, using, in this case, a bucket, okay? A bucket, all right? So to share a utensil or to use the same bucket to drink from, okay? This woman is astounded by that. She says, "Jews don't do this." Well, we do know something about Jesus, that he didn't always just do what the Jews always thought one should do, all right?

But the other thing to keep in mind is, again, this is some of the peculiarities of how the Jews understood their dietary and purity laws, is that it was okay to if there were certain foods that were not unclean, no matter what.

Bread, something that was dry, okay, could not be unclean. But when you got into stuff like liquid stuff, stuff that had moisture to it, that could carry with it uncleanness. And so to buy bread or to buy grain from a Samaritan, there was no problem in the Jewish understanding as far as that being clean or unclean, okay? Again, this is the peculiarities of the Jewish dietary and purity laws, how they interpreted those laws in the Old Testament.

And so understanding that helps you to helps us to see they were going in to get something that was, as far as purification goes, okay for them to do. But for in the minds of many Jews, for Jesus, to drink from the same bucket that this woman was using, there was something with that. So she's astounded by that. This is not normally how Jews do.

Jesus uses this opportunity to talk to her about a different kind of water, not the water from Jacob's well, but a living water. Now, in her mind, living water and living water is used in a more natural sense, talking about free-flowing water as opposed to water in a pond, okay? When this thing out here fills up with water, it is no longer it's not living water, okay? It's dead water, all right? Living water is water in a stream, okay? That flows. And so when Jesus talked about living water, her mind goes to this thing about, you know, a stream. Now, there's a question, you know? This, you know, a well is an underground stream, normally speaking, not always.

Sometimes you're just tapping down into an area where there's lots of groundwater, and it kind of pools in there. But oftentimes, wells are hitting a stream that's flowing underground. So possibly could this well could have possibly been living water. It may have been, particularly when she was thinking, "Well, you know, how can I get this living water?"

One of the things that's really interesting here that is similar to Nicodemus's response to Jesus, when Jesus talks about being born again. Remember, Nicodemus says, "Well, how can I enter into my mother's womb and be born a second time?"

There's an excessive literalism here, okay? There's an excessive literalism here. And a similar thing is happening here. She's saying, "Well, how can I get this free-flowing water? How can you get it? How can you give me any of that? You don't have a bucket.

You don't have a bucket." Well, just as he was talking to Nicodemus, and he was not talking about a physical thing. And that's one of the things I want us to understand here, and particularly because there is kind of a tendency in this to connect this particular passage with water baptism.

And some interpreters would talk about this being the water of baptism. Well, Paul, I mean, St. Peter tells us that it is not the washing away the filth of the flesh, but is the answer of a good conscience.

It's talking about an inward work, an inward change, an inward washing, okay, that the waters of water baptism symbolize, point to, and instruct us about, and proclaim, all right? But not all the blood of beasts and goats could wash away our sins.

Not all the waters not the water of Jacob's well could not would not bubble up and become the stream that Jesus talks about. The waters that we the water that we use in baptism does not wash away our sins. That is the blood of Jesus that was shed for us.

Those are signs. Those are symbols. Those are testimonies. Those are answers, and so on. But in of themselves, without faith, they have no benefit for us whatsoever unless they're combined with faith.

Jesus says, "Give me a drink." You would have asked Him, and He would have given you. If you knew the gift of God and who it is who says to you, "Give me a drink," you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.

How am I how are you going to get that, Jesus? And then she asks Him a question, "Are you greater than Jacob, our father, and his sons, our fathers, who used this well? Jacob dug this well? Are you saying somehow or another you are greater than Jacob?" And this isn't the first time, nor is it going to be the last time in which Jesus is asked, "Are you greater than?" Elsewhere, He was asked, "Are you greater than Abraham?"

And He says, "I tell you the truth. Before Abraham was, I am. Before Abraham was, I am," okay? He talks about when David says when David said to my Lord, and Jesus says, "Well, who was He talking to?"

Okay? There was a greater-than-David standing there before them, okay? And so Jesus is saying somewhat in an indirect way, but I think fairly clearly, "Yes, I am greater than Abraham. Yes, I am greater than Jacob. Yes, I am greater than the patriarchs. Yes, I'm greater than David.

I am. And I'm the one who can give you living water." Well, what is this living water that He's talking about? Well, He says, "I will that the water that I give Him will become to Him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life."

He said, "If you drink from this, the water in this well, as you will drink from any natural water, no matter how sweet and good it tastes, guess what? Later that day, you're going to need to drink again. Certainly tomorrow, you're going to need to drink again.

Natural water only satisfies for a period of time, and then you need more of it. You need to have another drink." Here, Jesus is talking about a water that springs up like a fountain and is always satisfying. It continues to satisfy. Now, if this woman was a Jew instead of a Samaritan, when Jesus talked about the living water and talked about a fountain of water, having heard the scriptures being read in the synagogue, their minds may have gone back to what Jeremiah said in chapter 2 of Jeremiah, verse 3, "For my people have committed two evils.

They forsaken me the fountain of living waters and hewed for themselves broken cisterns, unable to hold water." Or later on in Jeremiah 17, where it says, "O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake You shall be ashamed. Those who depart from Me shall be written in the earth because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters."

And Psalms 36, verses 9 and 10, where it says to God, "How You multiply Your mercy, O God. The sons of men shall hope under the shadow of Your wings. They shall be intoxicated." That's the Septuagint rendering, intoxicated, "under the shadow of Your wings. And You shall give them a drink from the abundant waters of Your delight. For with You is the fountain of life. In You, light in Your light, we shall see light."

And then there's that very strange passage, Ezekiel 47. Have your Bibles. Let's turn to that. Ezekiel 47, verses 1 through 12.

This is part of the vision that Ezekiel sees. It has to do with the temple. And it says, "Then he brought me back to the door of the temple, and there was water flowing under the threshold of the temple toward the east, for the front of the temple faced at east. The water was flowing from under the right side of the temple, south of the altar. He brought me out by the way of the north gate and led me around on the outside to the outer gateway that faces east, and there was water running out on the right side. And when the man went out to the east with the line in his hand, he measured 1,000 cubits, and he brought me through the water.

The water came up to my ankles. And he measured 1,000 and brought me through the waters. The waters came up to my knees. Again, he measured 1,000 and brought me through the water, came up to my waist. Again, he measured 1,000, and it was a river that I could not cross, for the water was too deep, water in which one must swim, a river that could not be crossed. He said to me, "Son of man, have you seen this?" Then he brought me and returned me to the bank of the river. And when I returned there, along the bank of the river were very many trees on one side and the other. And then he said to me, "This water flows toward the eastern region, goes down into the valley, and it enters the sea.

When it reaches the sea, its waters are healed." The waters of the sea are healed. What's that mean? They're changed from being salty to being sweet. "And it shall be that every living thing that moves wherever the rivers go will live. There will be a very great multitude of fish because their waters go these waters go there, for they will be healed, and everything will live wherever the river goes. It shall be that fishermen will stand by it from Engeti to Enigalim. They will be places for spreading their nets. Their fish will be of the same kinds as the fish of the great sea, exceedingly many. But its swamps and marshes will not be healed.

They will be given over to salt. Along the bank of the river, on the side, and that will grow all kinds of trees used for food. Their leaves will not wither, and their fruit will not fail. They will bear fruit every month because their water flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for medicine."

Now, that's a strange vision from a strange book.

Ezekiel's strange. It's okay. It's good that we have some strange things there, okay? I don't exactly understand what all that means, but I do know this. If you turn to Revelation, chapter 22, okay? It says this in verses 1 and 2, "And He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb in the middle of its street. And on either side of the river was the tree of life, which bore 12 fruits, each yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the trees were for the healings of the nations."

I think that's what Ezekiel was talking about there. I think that's what he was talking about. Now, you know, again, if one becomes excessively literal about this, how do you have a tree of life in the middle and on either side?

I'd like some artists to draw that and see what that's like, okay? One of the things that you realize as you read this kind of literature, and Ezekiel and Revelation is the same kind, apocalyptic literature in the scriptures, is that the imagery is vivid. It's extravagant.

And it is really only how should we say? The visual is really only something that we can kind of get a glimpse of. These folks are seeing something that is so amazing, and they're trying to describe what it is.

And the descriptions the reality just overwhelms the description. And that's what we have here, okay? So when Jesus talks about this living water, He's not talking about the water we drink every day. What is He talking about? Well, I think He's talking about the Holy Spirit.

And you know, He says, "If you drink of this water, it will be like a fountain that gushes up inside of you," okay? When you and He talks about this living water producing everlasting life, bringing everlasting life.

And remember, we talked about we looked at that. We saw that in chapter 3. So it's the Holy Spirit working inside of us, once having tasted of it, once having received it. And you remember Jesus says later on He says later on to His disciples before He's assumed up into heaven, before His ascension, He breathes on them in the upper room, and He says to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit." And here, He talks about the fact that He is going to give them. It's a gift that He's going to give them. And we talk in we can see in the letters, the epistles, and also in Acts, where we have the Holy Spirit being referred to as a gift.

And we talk then about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, those enabling things that are not natural but empower us to do the work that God wants us to do. But it not only helps us to do the work that God wants us to do, it's the very thing that makes it possible for us to have this everlasting life, okay? And it's not like natural water that you need to keep drinking it. You receive it, and then it is to bubble up inside of you and just gush out. Now, sadly, sadly, for some people, what do they do?

Having received it, they stop the well. They stop the fountain. And it stops gushing. And it stops working itself out. And they die.

They die. But that's not the way it's supposed to be. And that's not God's fault. That's our fault. It's what we do with it. So Jesus is saying to this woman and you notice here, He is making this offer to a Samaritan woman, someone who is not of the commonwealth of Israel, someone whom the Jews despised.

He is saying, "I want to give you this gift." She still doesn't quite get it. She says, "Oh, I'd like to have that gift. If you give me that gift, I will never have to come to this well. I'll never have to make this walk out to the well with my bucket. Drop it down. Haul it up. Put it on my shoulder. Carry it back in." That sounds like a good idea, okay? That laborious, everyday task I will be shocked of the rest of my life. "I'll take it, Jesus." That's what I see her saying. She still can't get her head wrapped around what He's talking about.

What does He say? "No, no, no, no, no, no. You don't get it." No, it's not what He says to her, okay? He says to her, "Bring your husband here." "Wow," she says, "I don't have a husband." And Jesus says, "Yes.

You've had five husbands, and the man you're with now is not your husband," okay? And what is her response to that? Suddenly, something becomes very clear to her. She is not dealing with an ordinary man. She is dealing with a prophet, somebody who can look into her heart and see who she is.

In fact, later on in the chapter, she tells her fellow Samaritans there in the town of Sichar, "I met a man who told me everything that I did." And she knows He didn't go into the city and find out who she was, okay? He had that spiritual insight, and He had that understanding. He could look into her heart. He could know who she is.

And Jesus does the same thing with each one of us. He knows who we are. He can look into our heart. And He can know who we are. He can know He does know who we are. He does know what we have done. He knows what we're hiding and what we're being honest about. We can fool people, but we cannot fool God.

For our deeds and even the innermost thoughts of our hearts are opened unto Him. And Jesus, it says elsewhere, knew what was in the hearts of men, okay? And He knows what's in my heart. He knows what's in your heart. And He knew what was in this woman's heart. And He knew that she was living in a wrong kind of relationship. She knew He knew that she was a sinner, that she was being disobedient even to what the law says.

And He confronted her with that. You know, I think this is somewhat instructive to us. When we are offering people living water, are we doing it without confronting them about where they really are, what their true condition is, what is the sin that's in their life? One of the things that I'm struck by, one of the things I'm really struck by, is that Jesus, when He went up onto the mountain there in Matthew, chapter 5, 6, and 7, and He began to teach, all right?

And He starts out with the blessednesses. And He talks there about people who are in this situation, who are ready for the kingdom of heaven, for such to use the kingdom of heaven. They're ready. In a sense, they are steps to entry into the kingdom of heaven. And then He talks about what is the nature of the kingdom of heaven that we are inviting people into.

And I think that when we do our evangelism, when we do our teaching, when we do our preaching, we fall into an evangelical trap if we do if we disconnect the gospel from the clear-cut demands that the Sermon on the Mount makes of people. We need to confront people with what Jesus says, okay? This is what we need to do.

That's not worse righteousness. That's not our own righteousness, but this is the righteousness of God. This is what God is calling us into. He's calling us to be rescued from the evil of this present day. And I think that part of telling people to count the cost is to confront them with the demands that Jesus makes on us and makes on all mankind and the expectation that He expects people to live by, all right?

And I think also, when we think about, you know, the fact that in our world today, there are all kinds of different people claiming to be Christians, okay?

Very, very few of them really believe that they're to live out the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Jesus, that that is required, that's necessary, that is non-negotiable. Most people think it's negotiable. A little while ago, I was reading about a group or a movement that calls itself Red Letter Christians. And you know, if you have one of those Bibles that have, you know, all the words of Jesus in red, do you have one of those? I hate those Bibles because I hate red print. It hurts my eyes.

So when I go look for a Bible, I always try to find one that doesn't have any of that awful red print, okay? But that's just a visual thing. It has nothing to do, okay? But the point of Red Letter Christianity is, okay, is that we're going to really pay attention to what Jesus says. And that's going to be our focus.

And sometimes, sometimes it's put up against what you read in the letters, in Paul's letters. And there's an effort, or at least to contrast the two. Now, I think that this is a result of something else that happened previously to that. I remember a number of years ago, I read a book by a rather well-known reformed preacher who had a radio program, wrote many books, and so on, by the name of R.C. Sproul. He since has passed on to his reward.

But it was about how to interpret the Bible, how to understand the Bible. And he had this statement, which I thought was rather interesting. He said, "We are not to go to the gospels for doctrine, but to the letters."

When I read that, I thought, "Says who? Where'd you get that one? Where'd you get that one?" But that is actually how much of evangelicalism works. They go to Paul's letters. And as Peter says, Paul is sometimes hard to understand. And they misconstrue what he says to argue for licentiousness, okay? And that is what much of evangelicalism does.

I think that now, the Red Letter Christians. Let me come back to that. So they're saying we need to pay attention to what Jesus says rather than what Paul says. So there's actually this website called Red Letter Christianity. It was very interesting to read it.

And after I finished reading and it's a wide movement, different perspectives, and so on like that. Some of them are really awful. When I read it, I thought, you know, I wish these guys were Red Letter Christians. It'd been nice if they were Red Letter Christians, if they seriously took everything Jesus said in account. But you know what I found?

It was pretty much cherry-picking what Jesus said, okay? It wasn't taking everything Jesus said. It was cherry-picking, cherry-picking the things that they liked about what He said. And so then what they have done is that they created a Jesus after their own image.

Oftentimes, what Christian Smith, the sociologist, describes as therapeutic, moralistic deism, where Jesus is this nice guy, and you're to be a nice guy too, okay? Not the Jesus who said, "Whoa." Not the Jesus who said, "If you don't do this, you'll go to Gehenna, where the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."

When Paul writes, and he quotes from the Old Testament, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God." I mean, no, yeah, fall into the hands of God. He's not simply talking about the Father.

Later on in John, we're going to see where Jesus talks about He's come into the world, and He's brought three things with Him. But we know that when Jesus comes again, He is coming as a judge, okay? And He will judge us, as He clearly tells us in the gospels, according to the deeds that we have done in the flesh.

And we will need we will be measured by what He has said, particularly what He's taught in the Sermon on the Mount and the whole nine yards of it, not just the parts that we kind of like.

And so He confronts her with this. And it's at that point she realizes she has encountered somebody who is special, who's extraordinary. But she still isn't willing to quite give it up. She isn't quite willing to be to give in on the whole thing. And she says so she introduces another thing here. Let's go back to John here.

She says, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain. And you Jews say that it is in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me. The hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father.

You worship what you do not know. We know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such to worship Him."

Now, He says something here about both Mount Gerizim and Jerusalem, Mount Zion, okay? He says, "They are both places where people come to worship." And really, neither one is going to get you where you need to be because those are temporary. They're pointing to something, but they're not the ultimate reality.

But He does say something about the Jews, okay? He says here, "You worship what you do not know. We know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews." I think Jesus could say as a Jew that, yes, indeed, the Jews have more knowledge. They not only have the Torah. They have all the rest of the Old Covenant, of all the other Old Testament books where God continued to reveal Himself through the prophets. And we see the playing out of God's working in Israel's life. We see that happening. And so, in a sense, the Jews have more information.

Paul says in Romans, chapter 3, verse 1 and 2, "What advantage then has the Jew? Much in every way, chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God." And that is no small thing. And one of the things that we have to keep in mind when we are when we are talking about the Old and the New Covenants, the Old Testament and the New Covenant, the Old Covenant that has passed away and the New Covenant that has superseded it, maybe not superseded it, but has, as Jesus says, has fulfilled it in Christ, as that whole thing was built on the Old Covenant, how do we know how God made the heavens and the earth?

Is it not the Old Testament that tells us that? Much of what we know about the character of God and who He is, what's it based on? It's based on His revelation in the Old Covenant. Much of what we understand and what the New Testament builds upon as far as how we are to live is found there in the Old Covenant. There is not a disconnect. There is a fulfillment, okay? There's a greater yet then. But we can see, at least in embryonic form, the reality that the New Testament is pointing to. Even the prophecies point to us. And this woman says later on, "We know the Messiah is coming." How does she know that?

Well, even in the Torah, Moses says in Deuteronomy, chapter 18, "Afterwards, there will come a prophet like unto me. He will be like me." And when we look at Moses, and I think I've said this before, but I just really want to emphasize it once again, Moses had in his being, in his person, all the offices. He was a priest. He was an intercessor between us and God, between man and God. He was a prophet. He was the one who spoke the word of God and proclaimed the will of God to the people. He was a ruler. He was a governor. And he ruled, and he governed. He was a king in a sense.

And so when Moses says that there will come one after me, a Messiah, an anointed one, a prophet who will be like me, he's talking about a prophet who is a king, is a priest, and speaks God's word as a person, as a Messiah who's a king, a priest, and a prophet.