Sermon Tone Analysis
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Intro:
Good morning.
If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those.
John, chapter 4. We're going to look at the first 26 verses of this chapter in the gospel of John.
You ever notice how great Jesus looks in all the pictures that you see of him?
Like, you never see the grimy, beat up by the world Jesus.
You get this sense that he's kind of otherworldly and too soft for the hardness of the world you and I live in.
That picture of Jesus removes him, in a very real way, from the grit and grime and blood and brokenness of your life and my life and of life in a fallen world.
The Gospel of John does a good job of painting a more real sense of who Jesus is.
John is trying to teach us, Jesus is in the dirt and the mud and the blood.
He's on the ground, in the grime with us, which is one of the big points of the Bible: God with us, not in some ethereal, heavenly way but right in the middle of the grime with us.
I honestly believe one of the reasons we struggle so badly to comprehend grace is that we've never really gazed into Jesus in the grime.
So, what I want to try to do is blow the circuits of your imagination this morning with the grace of God in Christ dwelling in the brokenness and bloodiness of human experience.
First, before we dive in, it's the point of the coming of Jesus Christ that he would enter the brokenness of his creation and begin to make things new.
But the religious fundamentalist didn’t like it.
The mission of Christ was offensive to the fundamentalists who got their sense of pride in their own will and ability to do better than what they perceived to be those around them.
Today, you and I have these front-row seats to that radical grace being poured out in an unexpected place in an unexpected time to an unexpected person.
With that said, let's look at John 4. Read John 4:1-26
I want to just highlight a few things about this story.
Here's the first thing.
There in verse 4 you have this phrase, and the phrase in the Greek is in the imperfect tense.
Here's the phrase as it reads in the ESV: "And he had to pass through Samaria."
Because it's in the imperfect tense, it could literally be translated, "He was having to go."
Now, there are some problems with that little sentence.
Here's what those problems are.
He wasn't having to go through Samaria.
There were a multitude of routes he could have gone.
In fact, he did not go on the route that most Jews of this age would have gone, which would have helped him avoid the Samaritans whom the Jews despised.
So he wasn't having to go because there was only one path, and he wasn't having to go because anyone made him go.
Jesus, the Spirit-filled man, being compelled by the Holy Spirit, maybe has a divine appointment.
He was having to go not because it was the only route and because someone was forcing him.
He was having to go because, compelled by the Holy Spirit, he followed that compulsion.
Then the next nine verses are significant.
If you've been here through our study of John, you know John has been deconstructing the Jewish worldview of how we're going to relate to God rightly.
Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, is greater than the lambs that would continually need to be sacrificed throughout one's life to make atonement for sin.
When Jesus is the lamb who takes away all sin, he's removing the sacrificial system off of the human beings on earth as their means in which to relate rightly to God.
Now we have living water, and he's at Jacob's well.
It's in this general area that Abram made his first sacrifice to God.
If you've been through a Genesis study, this is right around the area.
It's also in this area that God first gives the promise of land to his people.
This area is pretty significant.
Not only that but there are these other huge moments right around this well.
Like Abraham's servant met Rebekah, who would be Isaac's future wife.
Then Jacob met his future wife Rachel, and Moses met Zipporah who was his future wife.
And all our singles right here are like, "Where's this well?
Where's that well at?
I'm just asking for a friend.
How far are we from that well?"
There were a lot of pretty stunning directional outpourings of God's sovereign reign here at this well, and Jesus has just shown up and said, "Who cares about that water?
I have living water."
He's doing what he has done all along.
He's saying, "These other things would require you to do them over and over and over and over again, but what I want to do in you I want to do once and for all.
My sacrifice is complete.
The purity I bring and impute to you is complete.
No penance.
I am your Savior.
Living water is found in me.
Fullness of life is found in me."
That's the argument being made here.
Here's what's stunning as you read this.
She wants it.
This is an easy conversion.
Look at verse 15.
"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.'"
That was huge.
"I have living water.
Who wants this water when I have living water?"
She said, "Where do I get that living water?"
Play the song.
Let's do the altar call.
Get her name down in the books, right?
Then Jesus goes to a place that it's shocking that he would go.
If you didn't know the text and I said, "Guess what he says next," you're just not going to guess where he goes.
I think you could probably talk about these next five verses like this: there are the hidden wounds.
Read John 4:16-18
That just got awkward, didn't it?
"Give me this living water."
"Okay.
Do you want the living water?" "I do.
I want the living water."
"Okay.
Go grab your husband."
"Yeah, I don't have one."
"Yeah, you're right when you said you don't have one.
You've had five, and the one you have now is actually not your husband."
There isn't a lot of information on the backstory here other than you can tell it's irregular.
Let me tell you what we don't know.
We don't know if she has been widowed five times, which would explain why the sixth guy is like, "Nah, the nature of our relationship is going to be a little bit different."
Seriously.
I don't care how pretty she is.
If there are five dead dudes in her past who said, "I do…" I'm going to tell you what.
Pastor, I ain't saying, "Yes."
There's something back here.
Or maybe she was an adulterer.
There's something about her coming to the well at noon, which is not when you go to the well.
There's some kind of shame in her life that has her hiding, going to the well at noon, not wanting to talk about this with Jesus.
In fact, she's going to try some misdirection here in a second, but you can't really misdirect Jesus.
You know what I'm saying?
He stays in his lane, which is all the lanes.
He's not willing to accept from her some kind of easy believism that doesn't get into the root of her hurt.
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