"Snickers"
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SNICKERS COMMERCIAL LINK: https://youtu.be/3UO2A2p-19A
Have you seen the commercials for Snickers candy bars? They show one actor or actress and they are really out of place for the scene, and it ends with someone handing them a Snickers and saying “You’re not yourself when your hungry.” They take a bite and when the camera comes back on them, its someone more fitting for the scene.
This was a great marketing campaign for Snickers, but its built on something scientifically true.
It’s true that we are not ourselves when we are hungry. Also when we are thirsty, or when we are angry, lonely or tired.
We all have felt this at some time or another, where we are so deprived of something that we get angry, or depressed, or otherwise act out of character with how we normally act, or how we know we should act.
Tension
Today, we are going to look at two stories that build on this principle:
The first is the tired, thirsty people who should know God, and should trust Him, but don’t.
and the second is a lonely, thirsty woman who is seeking God, and learns to trust him.
Truth
Our first story is found in Exodus 17.
1 The entire Israelite community left the Wilderness of Sin, moving from one place to the next according to the Lord’s command. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink.
2 So the people complained to Moses, “Give us water to drink.” “Why are you complaining to me?” Moses replied to them. “Why are you testing the Lord?”
3 But the people thirsted there for water and grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you ever bring us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”
They started off pretty good, they left the Wilderness of Sin, Sin being the name of a moon goddess, not what we know as sin.
When they get to set up a camp at Rephidim, they discovered that there was no water for them to drink. And remember they are in the desert, and they have been traveling.
The people begin to complain to Moses and they began grumbling against him. This is not the first time they have grumbled either.
They seemed to forget that it was God who lead them out of captivity in Egypt. They lost their focus on God because of their lack of water.
4 Then Moses cried out to the Lord, “What should I do with these people? In a little while they will stone me!”
5 The Lord answered Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you. Take the staff you struck the Nile with in your hand and go.
6 I am going to stand there in front of you on the rock at Horeb; when you hit the rock, water will come out of it and the people will drink.” Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel.
Moses goes to God, he seems to be about as grumbly to God as the people are to him.
God directs him to take a core group of elders with him to go ahead of the group and take the staff that Moses had with him back at the Nile River where God worked through Moses and the staff to turn the river to blood during the plagues.
God assures Moses that He will go with him and stand in front of him.
He tells him to hit the rock that is there and water will come out of it so that the people can drink.
God is subtly tell Moses to remember what He has done for Isreal so far.
Isreal, remember the plagues of Egypt, when I saved you from slavery?
Isreal, remember the manna and quail I provided for you?
7 He named the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites complained, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Massah is translated to “testing” and Meribah means “quarreling”.
This episode of testing and quarrelling lead the Israelites to question if the Lord is even with them still.
We today have to recognize before we hit this point and realize that God is still with us, and we don’t need to test him and quarrel about our situation. We know what God has done in the Bible, and we know what he has done in our lives. We cant let our hearts go astray.
David refers back to Massah and Meribah in Psalm 95
8 Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah in the wilderness
9 where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was disgusted with that generation; I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray; they do not know my ways.”
11 So I swore in my anger, “They will not enter my rest.”
God’s own people, didn't know how to trust God. They didn't connect TRUTH and their relationship with God.
Truth did not lead to worship.
Daily life got in the way, it took their focus off of the one who saved them.
They were no longer in community with God, or with others. They had no hope because they had no memory of the things that God had done for them.
Our second story is a woman who thought she knew who she was, and the God who she was worshipping, but she was so caught up in the situation she was in, she had lost focus on who she was and the point of worship.
Turn with me to John chapter 4.
1 When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard he was making and baptizing more disciples than John
2 (though Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples were),
3 he left Judea and went again to Galilee.
4 He had to travel through Samaria;
5 so he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph.
There was a long standing feud between the Jews and the Samaritans. After the return from Babylon, some of the Jews went back home to Jerusalem, and some stayed in Babylon and intermarried with them.
They feared the Lord, but they also worshiped their own gods according to the practice of the nations from which they had been deported.
These people became the Samaritans. Jewish people hated the Samaritans and would avoid them at all costs.
But yet here we have Jesus, and we see that he HAD to go through Samaria. It wasn't a geographical need, rather Jesus had a divine appointment to keep.
Despite racial tension and years of segregation, he made his way to Samaria.
6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon.
7 A woman of Samaria came to draw water. “Give me a drink,” Jesus said to her,
8 because his disciples had gone into town to buy food.
9 “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” she asked him. For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.
10 Jesus answered, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water.”
11 “Sir,” said the woman, “you don’t even have a bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this ‘living water’?
12 You aren’t greater than our father Jacob, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and livestock.”
13 Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again.
14 But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”
15 “Sir,” the woman said to him, “give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and come here to draw water.”
The woman is at the well at high noon, in the heat of the day. Normally one would go to the well first thing in the morning, or in the late evening when it is cool. No one would do this unless the intentionally didn't want to be around people.
She is shocked that a man, let alone a Jewish man, was talking with her, a Samaritan woman.
She knows that Jews do not associate with Samaritans.
Jesus turns the conversation to spiritual things and tells her about living water. She almost humorously tells him that he couldn't give her any water because he doesn't even have a bucket!
Her head is still on earthly things, but Jesus is speaking of spiritual things.
As he tells her about this living water and how if you drink it, you will never thirst again.
With her still being earthly based, she thinks he means she will never have to come to the well again and get water to drink, but of course he is speaking of something more, a spiritual water that fills you up and never leaves, and springs out and out of us onto the rest of the world.
Jesus then directs the conversation to the woman’s life.
16 “Go call your husband,” he told her, “and come back here.”
17 “I don’t have a husband,” she answered. “You have correctly said, ‘I don’t have a husband,’ ” Jesus said.
18 “For you’ve had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
What Jesus brings up here is not the fact that this woman is a sinner. We don’t know exactly what happened, and it is not fair to put this blame on her. What Jesus sees is a woman who is hurting. She has been married and either divorced, through no choice of her own, or her husbands have died, or some combination of the two.
And now, because of this, she is living with a man so that she would be provided for.
At this point, when you realize that she is at the well at the heat of the day, alone, and when you learn her back story about her husbands and the situations that have lead her to be where she is today, you can imagine that she has given up hope.
Have you ever been there?
Have you ever reached the point where you have given up on yourself or your faith?
She realizes that Jesus is special.
19 “Sir,” the woman replied, “I see that you are a prophet.
because she recognizes that he is a prophet, she turns the conversation to religious things, and away from her past.
20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
This is one of the central issues in the feud between the Jews and Samaritans. The Jews worshipped on the mountain in Jerusalem where the temple is, but the Samaritans put their own temple on a mountain in their area, Mount Gerizim, and each one thinks the other is wrong for worshipping God in the wrong place.
Jesus gently corrects her thinking.
21 Jesus told her, “Believe me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews.
23 But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him.
24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”
Jesus is letting her know that he is bringing to earth the ability for individuals to worship God on their own, wherever they are.
Salvation was first offered to the Jews, but they were heart hearted and refused to follow Jesus, and the gospel had been opened up to the gentiles.
He also gets her away from thinking that the correct location of your worship is most important, when what God wants is a correct attitude of the worshipper.
Being a Samaritan, she knows the first five books of the Bible, written by Moses, and she knows of the Jewish Messiah.
She understands the old testament and the prophecies of the Messiah.
25 The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Jesus told her, “I, the one speaking to you, am he.”
She is waiting for the Messiah to come and explain everything to her, and he tells her that he already has. He shows up face to face with her and shows her the way.
When the disciples come back to Jesus with his Chick Fil-A nuggets and fries, we see them concerned that Jesus is talking with a woman.
27 Just then his disciples arrived, and they were amazed that he was talking with a woman. Yet no one said, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
28 Then the woman left her water jar, went into town, and told the people,
29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”
30 They left the town and made their way to him.
31 In the meantime the disciples kept urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
32 But he said, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.”
33 The disciples said to one another, “Could someone have brought him something to eat?”
34 “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work,” Jesus told them.
35 “Don’t you say, ‘There are still four more months, and then comes the harvest’? Listen to what I’m telling you: Open your eyes and look at the fields, because they are ready for harvest.
36 The reaper is already receiving pay and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together.
37 For in this case the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’
38 I sent you to reap what you didn’t labor for; others have labored, and you have benefited from their labor.”
This woman came face to face with Jesus, and he told her the thing that defined her the most and continued to talk with her. Giving her value and worth. After this, shef runs back to her town and tells everyone, all the people that used to shun her and make her feel like an outcast, she tells the good news of Jesus to.
Jesus is also teaching the Disciples a lesson about replication. He teaches them that evangelism is a process. Step one is planting seeds, step two is watering and step three is harvesting the crop.
We will see in Acts that Peter and John would later participate in another harvest among the Samaritans.
5 Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them.
6 The crowds were all paying attention to what Philip said, as they listened and saw the signs he was performing.
7 For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who were possessed, and many who were paralyzed and lame were healed.
8 So there was great joy in that city.
9 A man named Simon had previously practiced sorcery in that city and amazed the Samaritan people, while claiming to be somebody great.
10 They all paid attention to him, from the least of them to the greatest, and they said, “This man is called the Great Power of God.”
11 They were attentive to him because he had amazed them with his sorceries for a long time.
12 But when they believed Philip, as he proclaimed the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, both men and women were baptized.
13 Even Simon himself believed. And after he was baptized, he followed Philip everywhere and was amazed as he observed the signs and great miracles that were being performed.
14 When the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.
15 After they went down there, they prayed for them so that the Samaritans might receive the Holy Spirit because he had not yet come down on any of them.
16 (They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.)
17 Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
18 When Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money,
19 saying, “Give me this power also so that anyone I lay hands on may receive the Holy Spirit.”
20 But Peter told him, “May your silver be destroyed with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!
21 You have no part or share in this matter, because your heart is not right before God.
22 Therefore repent of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, your heart’s intent may be forgiven.
23 For I see you are poisoned by bitterness and bound by wickedness.”
24 “Pray to the Lord for me,” Simon replied, “so that nothing you have said may happen to me.”
25 So, after they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they traveled back to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans.
Back to our story, we find the Samaritans came from the town to find the man that the woman was talking about. The one who knew who she really was.
39 Now many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of what the woman said when she testified, “He told me everything I ever did.”
40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.
41 Many more believed because of what he said.
42 And they told the woman, “We no longer believe because of what you said, since we have heard for ourselves and know that this really is the Savior of the world.”
Starting with Jesus, and then the Samaritan woman, and then to the Samaritans.
They had a mission focused vision.
Their vision was wider than that of the disciples who had just been in the city to buy food and hadn't thought to share the gospel with the Samaritans.
Jesus had been in Jerusalem in John 2:23, and then he went into Judea in John 3:22, and then went to Samaria in John 4:4, where the Samaritans declared him to be the Savior of the World.
This is a perfect match to Acts 1:8
8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, Ends of the world
Application
The Bible is us looking in on people in the midst of their daily lives. In the good times and the bad times.
The Israelites had lost focus on who God is and questioned if he was even still with them. The focus of their worship was gone.
The Woman at the well, Her focus was on her past and present, and her hope was gone.
Jesus helped her to see that her past didn't matter, what mattered was truly worshipping God and acknowledging Jesus as the Savior of the world.
We need to keep our focus on Jesus.
Inspiration and Reflection
Truth leads to worship, worship leads to community.
Because of her redemption through Jesus, which comes by her faith in him, she is now in community with other believers in her town, the same people who used to isolate her from themselves.
Community then leads to Mission.
She and the other new believers had a new mission in their lives, to share the good news of Jesus.
They had a new hope.
Because of who Jesus is and what he has done, we can have hope.
Paul writes about hope in Romans 5:1-4
1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
2 We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
3 And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance,
4 endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope.
When we are reconciled with the Father through Jesus Christ, we can boast in the hope that we have. We can shout it from the rooftops. We can boast about where we have come from and how Jesus came face to face with us and changed us.
When we are suffering, we learn to endure and that endurance helps us to develop a godly character and lifestyle. When we do this, we are able to grasp on to the hope that is offered only through Christ.
You are not the same when you lose hope.
For thirst, a temporary fix is drinking a cool glass of water.
For hunger, a temporary fix is eating a Snickers.
For eternal hope, the only fix is Jesus.
14 But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”
Action
Have you been dealing with something that has left you questioning if God is still there?
Have you been to the well lately?
Have you sought out the living water that Christ provides?
Or have you just grumbled about it to others?
Have you refilled your hope?
Have you thought about where God has brought you from and all that he has done for you?
SNICKERS Reflection
(“Here I am To Worship” plays throughout.)
Tonight, I want to do something special.
I would like for us to take a moment of reflection.
But we will not be using bread and juice to remember what Christ did for us.
Tonight we want to reflect on the hope that we have in Jesus, and the life that he can give us if we accept it.
So while it is definitely not traditional, and definitely not in the Nazarene manual, I would like to share in a time of reflection on the fact that we are not ourselves when we are hungry or thirst, angry, lonely or tired.
It is during those times we are at our weakest as humans. And when those times come we need to reflect on what God has done for us in the past, as well as the hope that we have in Him for the future, and let us keep our eyes fixed on him, worshipping him in spirit and in truth, instead of grumbling and complaining, and even questioning if God is still with us.
This is not a required activity, if you have a dietary concern, or just a personal preference to not take and eat, that is absolutely fine.
This is just a little activity to help us reflect and remember.
ONCE EVERYONE HAS A SNICKERS BAR
Tonight, we have in our hands a symbol of the hope we have in Christ during our times of need.
Lets take it and we will eat it, and reflect on what God has done for us,
to help us hold tight to our hope in Christ even though the hard times will come.
Lets go to God in prayer:
PRAYER
Oh God, even now I find that my soul needs to be filled,
my thirst needs to be quenched, and my hunger needs to be satisfied.
I'm not sure, Father, why the spiritually dry periods come, but they do.
I gladly confess, however, that they make my desire to experience Jesus' living water more intense.
I have tasted your goodness, and I want more of it.
More every day.
I have drank from your fountain, and I want you to fill me up and overflow out of me and into the world.
Keep your life giving stream flowing in me.
Keep me focused on you, constantly remembering what you have done for me,
and focused on the hope and mission that you have given me.
Lord I want to remember who you are and remember who I belong to.
Lord here i am to worship you in spirit and in truth.
Sing HERE I AM TO WORSHIP