Clough John Lesson 21

Jesus Demonstrates Evangelistic Guidelines – John 4:1-19

In our study of John so far we have seen the Lord Jesus Christ on His first Jerusalem trip. We’ve seen Him confront the authorities in Jerusalem. These were a group of religious goons that controlled the sacrificial system and the coin exchange system. They were ripping off millions from the people besides making it very difficult for the common person to worship the Word of God by introducing distractions into the various temple areas. We saw Jesus in a confrontation with a representative of the religious establishment in the city of Jerusalem and then last week we saw Him branch out into the Judean countryside. So we have seen a progress of sorts; we have seen Jesus move first from the temple to the city. Then we have seen Him move from the city into the countryside, and tonight He leaves Judea entirely. So therefore the Gospel of John begins with a note of pessimism, a note that after all this nation will not accept Christ. This nation is on negative volition and Jesus Christ, as I said earlier in the studies of the Gospel of John, you’re going to see activities that Christ does in this Gospel that you would never think that He would do, namely that He turns away and apparently has very little concern for those who have little concern for the Word of God.

John then, begins in John 1:4 showing us why Jesus left Judea. “When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, [2] (Though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,) [3] He left Judea, and departed again into Galilee.” So therefore the Pharisees now bring Jesus under their surveillance. We’ve already studied how they brought John under their surveillance and they demanded a complete inspection because of the various Mishnahic laws. These laws specified there would be two levels of investigation; one level of investigation would be directed toward identifying whether or not a teacher was making Messianic claims. A second level of investigation was directed towards the question of whether or not these claims were valid. So there would always be an official investigation once there was suspicion of a Messianic movement in the land. And therefore Jesus knows that the Pharisees heard about it and He leaves. Jesus is doing what we saw the people ought to have done at Masada, he avoids a premature confrontation. There are some times to do battle and there are other times to retreat, and according to Jesus this is one of those times when retreat is the wisest course.

So Jesus moves out, it says in verse 2 that He did not baptize, His disciples did. This is delegation of work, the point being, as in Acts 6, teaching of the Word of God always comes first; all other activities second. This goes for the local congregation, whenever the pastor is doing 8,000 other things besides teaching the Word of God, besides doing the hours and hours of research that are necessary to teach accurately the Word of God, then something is wrong, something is drastically wrong. There are altogether too many ministers in this city that are run by their congregation. Whatever the congregation wants, the minister gives it to them, and that’s not the way it ought to be. The minister is an elder, he is the one in authority, not the congregation. And therefore what he deems necessary from the Word is what ought to occur. So Jesus is operating in the same way, He does not baptize, His disciples do the baptizing. He hasn’t got time for lesser things.

In verse 3 He abandoned Judea; in the Greek it’s a powerful verb for leave, it means to abandon. And we find by comparing with the other Gospels Jesus reluctantly and does not actually go back to this area for some time; He abandons the field to the enemy. He withdraws and He goes to Galilee. Galilee is the most northern area; those of you who have been training in the geography of Palestine, now you know exactly where Galilee is, you know that it is separated from Judea, and that Jesus Christ, by going to Galilee is getting out of the religious environment. He’s going into the backwoods areas because it was there that He must develop the seeds of His own movement, without religious interference. Jesus, in other words, laid low.

And this is a work that God accomplishes through Jesus Christ, that oftentimes you will see God use in various men’s lives. What the public doesn’t know and what people in large newspapers and everyone else doesn’t know won’t hurt them. That’s the philosophy being used of our teacher’s conference; it will not be publicized abroad, we do not want the community at large to know what’s going on. Again, what they don’t know won’t hurt them, right yet. So as we proceed to build a Christian underground movement it is very wise to keep this out of the public eye to avoid premature confrontation. These people are not worthy of truth and therefore shouldn’t be given the truth. So therefore in verse 3 Jesus goes to Galilee, and quite literally saying the hell with Judea. This is necessary; it is necessary in order for the teaching of the Word of God to survive.

 And it says in John 4:4, “It is necessary,” or “He must needs go through Samaria.” Now there were two roads, Samaria being in between the Valley of Jezreel, there are two roads from Jerusalem; the trunk route that goes north-south along that area and then road through the Jordan Valley. Those were the options open to Jesus. The Galileans, and Jesus was a Galilean, never bothered with the road through the Jordan Valley. The pious self-righteous crowd always liked to go through the Jordan Valley so they wouldn’t have to pollute the souls of their sandals walking through Samaria. But the other people that could care less, they just went direct through and that’s how Jesus Christ is walking. This is pointed out here because there’s an incident that will occur.

But when you see, “He must needs go through Samaria,” we are there again faced with John’s two levels. Remember time and time again we’ve seen this apostle has this system of writing in which he gives us what appears to be just a surface statement but then underneath there’s a whole bunch of other truth. On the surface he is saying Jesus had to go through here. Why? We can only surmise but a man by the name of Herod Antiper reigns in this area and John the Baptist is baptizing right about there, and John is about to lose his head because Herod Antiper thinks he feels threatened by this popular movement, like his father, he always suffered from paranoia and therefore he was very suspicious of John the Baptist. Therefore Jesus wanted to avoid a confrontation, apparently, with Herod so it was necessary that He go through Samaria.

But that’s not the only reason it was necessary that He go through Samaria. It was also necessary that He go through Samaria in order to meet a particular woman at a particular well at a particular time in order to set off and trigger the revival at Sychar, the first area in which the Word of God goes beyond the Jew into a non-Jewish community, testifying to the universal claims of Christ that He is the Savior of all men.

Now some background on Samaria. Turn to 2 Kings 17:23; what was Samaria and what were the issues, issues that we must understand if we are to understand the woman’s conversation. In the year 721 BC the northern kingdom fell and when it fell, according to verse 23, “the LORD removed Israel out of His sight, as He had said by all His servants, the prophets. So was Israel carried away out of their own land to Assyria unto this day. [24] And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Avva, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaium, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in its cities. [25] And so it was at the beginning of their dwelling there, that they feared not the LORD; therefore, the LORD sent lions among them, which slew some of them. [26] Therefore, they spoke to the king of Assyria, saying, The nations whom thou hast removed, and placed in the cities of Samaria, know not the manner of the God of the land; therefore, he has sent lions among them, and, behold, they slay them, because they know not the manner of the God oft the land. [27] And the king of Assyria commanded, saying, Take there one of the priests whom you have brought from there; and let him to and dwell there, and let him teach them the manner of the God of the land. [28] Then one of the priests, whom they had carried away from Samaria, came and dwelt in Bethel, and taught them how they should fear the LORD. [29] However, every nation made gods of their own, and put them in the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made, every nation in their cities in which they dwelt. [30] And the men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth, and the men of Cuth made Nergal, and the men of Hamath made Ashima….”

It goes on and describes the various gods and shows that what you have here is the bastard mixture of divine and human viewpoint; you have an influx of divine viewpoint from the priests but the culture of the people is basically human viewpoint. Just like in many parts of America you have a basically rural conservatism married to the Bible; the one must be carefully separated from the other, they are not identical. And so in Samaria you had that situation, you had a native conservatism from their own background, their own culture, then you had the Word of God added to it as a veneer. And it came up with sort of a hybrid. The Jews forever afterwards in the history had a name for these people; they called them by a word which denotes lion converts, and it was equivalent in our day to our expression, foxhole converts, people who are in war and vow oh God, oh God, if I ever get out of this foxhole with the mortars breaking around me then I’ll do great things for you, just get me out of this foxhole alive, and they are sort of pushed into conversion by the pressure of the moment. And so the Jews always used this passage as an example of foxhole conversions; these were called lion conversions. And it was a term of ridicule for the Samaritans.

2 Kings 17:32 is a classic formulation of a bastard theology, “So they feared the LORD, and also made unto themselves of the lowest of them priests of the high places, who sacrificed for them in the houses of the high places. [33] They feared the LORD, and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from there.” You see, the king of Assyria had a policy of settlement; he wanted to secure the areas that he had conquered and he had conquered this area all up in the northern part in 721 BC. He took the Jews out of the land and then brought in Gentiles from various other lands. This way he felt by introducing foreign elements into the population he could more carefully control them. That was his policy, and by the way, it did work.

So that’s the background for the Samaritans. Later on the community gave trouble to the Jews in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, they rewrote the Pentateuch, claiming that God gave the Law not on Mount Sinai, far to the south, but on Mount Gerizim; they also argued that the Jews whole complete system of ritual was wrong. And during the first of the month when the Jews would light fires in the land, at the time the ceremony was going to go the Samaritans would light fires maybe five or ten minutes off the time, just to confuse the Jewish timekeeper.

And this rivalry was going on until finally it got very vicious under the Hasmonean period when some of the Hasmoneans just went in and cleaned up Samaria, tore down the walls and murdered many of them. So relations were not quite sweet in Jesus day. You had a combination of race and religion, two volatile elements between these two communities. It would be much like you’re seeing in Boston today where you generally have blacks who are Protestants and you have the Irish who are Catholic. You couldn’t ask for two more volatile elements for the federal government to come in and ram and cram together. So here you have the Samaritans and the Jews, different races and different theologies and different creeds, and therefore a great rivalry between them.

That’s the background if we turn back to John for what happens this afternoon when Jesus Christ went and met this woman. We want to be careful as Christians as we look at this passage because we can learn a lot about personal evangelism from watching how Jesus Christ deals with the people of His day. We watched Him how He dealt with Nicodemus, how He was very careful to show Nicodemus the starting point of the conversation versus Nicodemus’ starting point. Jesus distinguished the divine viewpoint starting point which led to this place and the human viewpoint starting point which led to another place. Jesus never mixed the two views together. He always kept them distinct; He always knew His doctrine and was able to apply it very well and this is why we have such frothy evangelism today, because we have so few believers who are interested in Bible doctrine. If we were to have some sort of a show with trombones and gold fish and all the rest of the gimmicks that are used in the various churches, we would have an outstanding crowd I’m sure, but that’s because people are interested in these things rather than the Word of God. And quite bluntly say the hell with that. We’re not interested in putting on shows, we’re interested in teaching the Word of God and if you’re not interested this is the wrong place for you.

John 4:5, “Then comes he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar,” it’s a place… there are three cities and I’m going to show slides of these cities and they mustn’t be confused. There are two mountains, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal; there is a road that runs north-south, that’s the trunk route, that’s the one that Jesus Christ is walking on. They come to a place and then there’s a crossroad here that cuts through like this; this is the city of Samaria. Now this woman is said to be a woman of Samaria but by that title we don’t mean she came from the city of Samaria, she came from the area of Samaria. So Samaria is a name of a city but it’s also the name of an area and when it’s applied to the woman in John 4 it’s not the city, it’s the area. This was later called Sabaste, Herod renamed it for Augustus Caesar. And then we have another city over here, today it’s called Nablus, it used to be in the Bible Shechem. And just north about two and a half miles up the hill from this valley area is Sychar, now called Askar. But these are all real places and to see some of the things that Jesus is going to refer to we must look at the terrain of those places.

So once again we will look at some slides, get some geographical background so that we can understand the text. Here is a shot of where John 4 took place; these two roads that divide here are part of this trunk route. Travelers took them from south to north, Jesus was coming from down here in Jerusalem; He could have gone through the Jordan Valley but refused because of the various political situations. John the Baptist is over here at the moment and he’s about to get arrested and Jesus does not want His disciples going along this road and to get involved in that little operation. So therefore it is necessary that Jesus go this road; this is the highway they are now traveling. As you proceed north on this highway you come by these two mountains; here is Mount Gerizim and there is Mount Ebal. These are the two mountains where in Joshua the covenant was ratified in the land. You’ll notice there’s a pass between these two mountains that goes northwest. Up here on the map is a place called Sabaste which is the modern name for the old ruins of Samaria. You can see it’s way up and far away from the place of John 4. Here is the modern city of Nablus built on the site of the old Biblical city of Shechem. And just up this road, this north-south road is the place of Sychar. At the crossroads just to the east of Nablus, right at the crossroads is Jacob’s well, and that’s the well that you’re going to read about tonight. [he continues showing slides] The woman that you’re going to see came from a little village on this hill. That woman came down to get her water, down here to the well of Jacob which is located in this area, and this is where she came from. Jesus and His disciples came along this road, for the modern road is where the ancient road was. They walked along here and they stopped, Jesus stopped here and He sent His disciples on up to go up to this village to buy some food and come back down. The conversation you’re about to read in John 4 took place here, because somewhere along the road the disciples and this woman had passed, she coming down from here to here, the disciples going from there up to the village to buy food. You see on the right hills; it is those hills that Jesus is referring to that had grain on them that was ripe unto harvest; they were all white at the time of John 4. They still farm these hills as you can see. This is what poor Jacob’s well has become. This is why the modern Israeli thinks this is Christianity, and this is why it takes missionaries to show that Christianity is not all this stuff; I can only liken that to an appliance shop. That is actually built over the authentic site of Jacob’s well. We dropped some water down in there to see how deep it was, it turns out it was about 100 feet; remember that for the passage in John 4. It’s very cold and very pure, very wonderful water. That’s the background geographically for John 4.

Now John 4:5, “Then came he to the city of Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.” Remember capital assets before socialist government got going, capital assets were transferred within the third divine institution through inheritance. But we have this brilliant new deal ideal of taxing people because they’re wealthy which is blasphemy; it is prejudging a persons use of wealth before they use their wealth. And if you had any wealth whatsoever you should figure all the ways and means that you can slip that wealth to your children and avoid inheritance taxes; it is your Biblical responsibility to provide capital assets for your children and to maneuver every way you can to avoid all inheritance taxes. Inheritance taxes are unbiblical; they’re an attempt by socialism to destroy the family unit and they’re always promulgated in the name of helping the poor and they do not help the poor. Every time you see this business of we’re doing this to equalize wealth, we’re doing this to help the poor, just remember the saying about Robin Hood, Robin Hood robbed the rich to pay the poor but finally Robin Hood robbed both rich and poor to pay Robin Hood. And that’s what always happens to these great schemes. Now in this day, before socialism, people had the freedom to pass their property and their capital assets on to their children, private enterprise and private property is God’s way.

One of the most exciting parts of this particular asset that Jacob gave Joseph was the well. The well was a priceless possession in the ancient world, particularly this well; you saw in the film people getting water out of that well. Now did it dawn on you that that well has been giving water since the year 2000 BC at least and this is almost 2000 AD; for 4000 years that well has produced tremendous water. Now God in His tremendous providence could have had this incident in John 4 happen anywhere on the face of the earth, but God chose one particular well for this incident to happen to teach us a particular truth about our so-great salvation.

This couldn’t have happened at any well in Palestine and have this precise effect. So therefore in verse 6 the Greek uses a particular word to express the well, pege. Why this word? It’s not the usual word for “well” in the Bible. It is a word that denotes a special kind of well fed by an underground stream. And this is why, in spite of the many, many gallons of water taken out of this well by herdsmen, because in ancient times it didn’t have the Greek convent over it and you had this well being used to supply flocks of sheep. This well has had thousands and thousands and millions of gallons of water taken out of it and it keeps on producing the clear, cool, pure water because it’s constantly fed with a spring.

Jesus is going to make a remark later on that won’t make much sense without this geographical background and what the well was where the woman was drawing her bucket from. So it was a particular kind of well, a pege well, a well that was supplied by an underground stream. And the well therefore, in 4000 years has never gone dry.

John 4:6, “Now Jacob’s pege was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour.” And when you see the rock around that well and you visit it and you see the rocks on the side of the wailing wall, and sometimes comes the urge, you wonder if you could only talk to the rock what fantastic things that rock has seen, but alas, the rock is mute and you can’t speak to it, it won’t talk back, the only place we can get any talking back is this Word of God in our lives. So we’re closer to having some verbal information here than you would be two inches away from that rock that you saw in the slide. But that rock was the rock on which Jesus sat, and I want you to notice in verse 6 how Jesus Christ in His true humanity, for John always pictures Christ with a true humanity, Jesus is weary and He’s tired. This may be a small point but you must understand that Jesus Christ according to Hebrews 4:15 was tempted in all points as we are, and if Jesus was not true humanity and if He never experienced the feeling of being sick and of being tired and of having these pressures upon His body, then Jesus Christ was not tempted in all points as we are.

Now Jesus was not sick in the common sense of the word but one can argue that sickness is but a degree of tiredness, and if that’s the case, and by that definition, Jesus was partly sick; He experienced the results of living in a fallen world, and therefore Jesus Christ, when you pray through His name to the Father, He can understand your plea. That’s what Hebrews 4:15 says, “We have an high priest” who got dirt under His fingernails, whose bones did ache at times, and whose body knew what it meant to be tired. And Jesus Christ is very weary at this point, He’s walked all the way north from Jerusalem and the proof of how tired He is, is that He stops on that road that comes north, the crossroads, the well of Jacob located there, that highway that keeps on going and then comes up to this little village of Sychar, Jesus Christ stops here at the well, He says this is a good place to stop for lunch, now you go on up ahead two miles to the nearest 7-11 and get Me a snack and bring it back. He sends the disciples, He delegates the work and they go ahead and get out of the way.

Now He also had another reason because this incident couldn’t have happened so smoothly with people who were all thumbs; this is very tricky evangelism that’s going to happen here and Christ had to get rid of believers who don’t know doctrine. Now at times, this sounds cruel but at times God gets rid of believers who don’t know doctrine. I am thankful for some of the people that we’ve gotten rid of from this congregation. We’ve had some people that have been here for 2 or 3 months and have torn the place up; they’re troublemakers and the Lord has always worked it out so that they get hacked and leave. And I rejoice every time one leaves; I pity the poor pastor who has to take them but I’m glad that God doesn’t give them to me. So there are times when you don’t want believers around, they just get in your way. And this is one of the situations. Jesus had to deal with this woman alone; to be effective He had to be alone at this point.

It says that He was weary and we’ve already mentioned that, we have said that He is sitting there on the well and at least we can reconstruct something that must have gone through his mind from the human point of view. Jesus knew that He would want to address the Word of God to this place at Sychar; maybe He looked forward to doing that that afternoon after He had lunch, but He was tired and He wasn’t hungry and He wasn’t, you might say from the human point of view, in the mood for carrying on a big long conversation. But I think this also will show you a very interesting thing about evangelism. Those of you who have been raised in a fundamental religious background your idea of evangelism is getting all hopped upon Wednesday or Thursday night and going and knocking on doors and coming back and telling how many scalps you got and so forth, and sending in to some convention someplace how many people you led to the Lord supposedly. And that’s your picture of evangelism and it’s not Scriptural. What you ought to do is train yourself in the divine viewpoint framework with Bible doctrine and when you are prepared God will give you opportunities. That’s true Biblical evangelism. You don’t find Jesus going knocking on doors, going down the streets of Jerusalem with a campaign of putting tracts on everybody’s door knob. That was not the tactic of the disciples and it was not the tactics of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is true evangelism. Jesus was prepared and God brought the needy person to Him. And you know that this is true evangelism because who could bring this particular woman at that particular hour to that particular spot when Jesus was thinking those particular thoughts.

The situation itself has been brought about by the Spirit of God; that is true evangelism. That is your true contact; become trained believer and you have to slam your door shut to keep people away. God will create more opportunities than you could possibly fulfill. I’m not thinking in terms of hundreds, I’m not meaning that; I said more opportunities than you can fulfill. And that might be 2 or 3 because people are individuals and it may take you months of working with just one individual. I have a prayer request of a student who’s given some material to his professor; this dialogue between this particular student and professor may go on for month after month after month; God has brought that student and that faculty member into contact; God has created that contact and it may be all that that student can handle with his studies and his other priorities as a student. But that’s all right, God has brought that about, that student witnessing situation, and if he’s faithful to God, always going back to the Scripture, he’ll have proof and will be down to his credit that he took advantage of the situation when God brought it about.

So Jesus, what we’re saying is when He’s tired, from the human point of view it wasn’t the most opportune moment to talk to someone about Christ. Physically Jesus was exhausted at this point. Physically He could have said oh Lord, can’t you wait for two or three minutes until I get my hamburger, but He didn’t; He stopped and He was open to God’s leading at this particular point in His life and He said all right, in His humanity he would reflect, God, you’ve brought this woman here, she’s in spiritual need, I must deal with it and so regardless of how he felt physically He went ahead and obeyed the word. And that’s another feature of true evangelism. See, a lot of fundies operate like the old Indians used to; before they go to war they have some whoop whoop war party where they get all high, and this can take the form of a hand-holding prayer meeting or it can take a thing of everybody shouting and turning the lights off and on and holding their hands up to the ceiling and so forth, this kind of thing can go on and everybody gets high and then we’ll go out and slay people for Christ or something. Well, Christ, at this point emotionally I am sure did not feel like witnessing. That’s an excellent opportunity to pause and reflect on your own attitude in evangelism.

Here Jesus Christ was tired and emotionally He was probably down and yet that was God’s designed opportunity for Him to obey, in the middle of the time when He was tired, and in the middle of the time when He was not on an emotional high. And you don’t read about some five hour prayer meeting of preparation before this woman came to Him. It was all on the spur of the moment, it just happened as quickly as that. And He had to be ready to seize the opportunity and so He did. True evangelism!

John 4:7, “There came a woman of Samaria to draw water:” that well that you saw, and she had obviously something because nothing was left there, now the well today has a bucket that’s preserved by the Greek Orthodox monks but originally that wasn’t true, the well just had a cover over it and the hole and you had to bring your own utensil; they usually had this leather bag and a long thong. So they’d let this bag down, it had to be a real long thong to do so because it was 100 feet down, and so the woman had to carry this on her back, she’d drop it down, fill it with water, pull it all the way up, and then go back up to that city two miles up the road. “Jesus said unto her, Give me something to drink.”

Now the first principle of Jesus working with the woman is that He starts in an area of common ground that is really not often used as common ground. There’s a big debate going on in Christian circles about this term, common ground. What is the common ground that the believer has with the unbeliever? Is it true that both the believer and the unbeliever perceive the world the same way, so that I can walk as Thomas Aquinas and prove God’s existence to the non-Christian and after I’ve proved God’s existence then I go on into the sphere of grace and show that he can become a Christian? Is this the way we perceive from unbelief, by a continuous straight line over to belief because we share common ground in the intellect? And the answer is no; common ground is not to be found in the area of commonly held beliefs. And Jesus does not approach the woman in the area of commonly held beliefs. You do not see Him saying, Woman, now the Samaritans have this concept of God and the Jews have this concept of God, now let’s get it all together.

Jesus doesn’t work that way. Instead He selects this common ground, something other than how she thinks. What is the common ground He selects? The most obvious thing if you know the divine viewpoint. It goes back to this Framework so again we get a plug for the divine viewpoint Framework, the first one, creation, that’s the common ground. What does Jesus do? He approaches the woman as a fellow creature, dependent on things outside of herself, not what she thinks about the world but how she is in the world, that’s the common ground. The person you talk to about Christ, you know a lot before you even know their name. You know before you open your mouth to that person that that person is made in God’s image who will only be satisfied when they have met Jesus Christ face to face. You know that they have been designed and built to have fellowship with God forever and ever and ever and they are going to be perpetually unhappy until they reach that position. You know in advance of their name and anything else about their life that that person also carries within their physical body the genes of Adam and therefore they’re fallen and therefore they have a sin nature that rebels against the light and turns away from it, wanting it but not wanting it, that ambiguity that’s inside the soul that tears people up. You know all that about a person before you even know their name. So before the conversation starts understand what you have in common with that unbelieving person; not names, not background, maybe not race or religion as in this case, but you’ve got one thing in common; you’re both made in God’s image and you both have to depend on things outside of yourself because you’re finite, you’re not infinite; you’re not unlimited.

And so He approaches her with a very, very simple request; to underscore that, “Woman give me something to drink.” The Son of God asking a lone Samaritan woman for something to drink. Why? Because her body needs water and so does His. They both have common ground in the area of creation; they’re both dependent creatures and so she can understand this fact and He knows that this can be the bridge that He now begins to develop.

John 4:8 is an explanation, why didn’t Jesus, if He was thirsty, someone might ask reading this text, why if Jesus was thirsty did not He let His own drinking utensil, His own leather bag, why didn’t He let that down in the well? Because it says in verse 8, “(For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy food.)” The city is Sychar, and they’d probably taken it with them leaving Jesus at the well without any thong, without anything to drink

John 4:9, “Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, ask a drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.” The end of verse 9, by the way, is an editorial comment introduced by the Apostle John to explain the context. So the woman is kind of shocked at this request. She’s shocked in the light of the political, religious and racial divisions between the two communities, and of all things, what Jesus was asking this woman to do was to reach down well with the piece of leather that her lips touched and His lips would have to touch and He was saying to the woman, not only give Me to drink but we’re going to drink out of the same utensil. And so this cuts to the woman and gets her attention; you, a Jew, not only talk to me but you’re asking me to give you a drink and we’re going to drink out of the same utensil? Yes!

John 4:10, now watch Jesus begin to move, first He’s established communication at the point of being common ground; the woman and He are both finite creatures; they’re both limited, they’re both dependent upon something outside of themselves. Now watch how Jesus works. If we look carefully at this, understanding Jesus is also God, we know how the Holy Spirit still works today. “Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knew the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou would have asked of him, and he would have given you living water.”

Notice what He does in verse 10; it’s very clever of Jesus to do this, He puts all sorts of theologically pregnant words in his question. He says “woman, if you knew the gift of God,” implying that maybe she doesn’t, implying the fact that must be always watched for in evangelism. You can only go as far as the person understand spiritual issues, and Jesus Christ has a problem and He is going to have to overcome this problem. This woman thinks in terms of literal water and somehow Christ is going to have to direct her mind to her spiritual needs. This woman has put her spiritual needs out of her conscience for years and years and years and years. When that woman comes down, we don’t know how old she is but she’s old enough to be married five or six times. When she comes down to that well, she has had a history of putting God’s revelation out of her mind. And so Jesus Christ must say to Himself, in effect, something like this: woman, the gospel is an answer to a question, the question is how can I be saved, and the answer is by believing in Christ. But woman, you’re so sad and you’ve put this question out of your mind for so many years, you’re not even asking the right questions, so before I can give you the answer, woman, I’ve got to teach you how to ask the right question.

And this is very, very vital in evangelism. Don’t talk prematurely about solutions until you are sure that that person to whom you are witnessing understands the spiritual issue. That’s why I warn you, I’m not trying to undercut evangelism when I say this but that’s why I keep warning you over and over and over about this business that goes on and that is talking to people about their psychological needs and then immediately with no explanation then we hop over here and somehow Jesus is Savior. And that’s a thousand ways wrong; you can’t go from just psychological needs to Jesus Christ because my problem is not just psychological needs; they’re there but that’s not the issue, it’s my moral sin pattern against God’s holy righteousness and until that issue is clear I’ll never understand what it means to say Jesus is my Savior. The only other conclusion you can come to when you start talking about oh isn’t there an emptiness in the life; yes there’s an emptiness in my life. Now how do you define the emptiness and why is it there; that’s got to happen; you can’t jump from the emptiness to Christ. It’s too fast and may result in a conversion but from the behavior of a lot of so-called converts of this recent crusade I seriously doubt they were ever born again because they jumped too fast from the vacuum in their life, from a need in their live over to Christ before they understood the issue. They must know what the gift of God is first, then they’ll ask for it correctly. The gift of God is not a psychological aspirin with “Jesus” on it. The gift of God is something far, far more wealthy and more precious than that. So this is why He says woman, if you knew the gift of God then you’d ask the right question.

So in verse 10 Jesus begins to operate on that woman so she’ll think right so she can ask the right question. And I make this pitch again in our day of evangelism because people today, raised in our existing educational system are not taught to think. You can drop a literal intellectual bomb in the middle of a classroom and ho-hum, five more minutes to the bell. Now what has produced this kind of thing. It used to be by the time kids were first year in college they could talk Plato and Aristotle and they’d read some of the classics. You mention Plato and who’s she? Now what’s caused all this to happen? We have had an educational system that has stressed social adjustment, has addressed itself to the problem of coddling everyone along, not teaching any content, not requiring anything because you might stress the poor little idiot; you might give someone an inferiority complex to flunk them, and the result has been… and this is where this is no longer funny but very serious from our point of view as witnessing Christians. Can you lead someone to Christ who doesn’t think? This is what you’re seeing in John 4, you’re seeing a woman who is totally uneducated and you’re seeing Christ having to go to the n^th degree in the conversation to get this woman to think. That’s the whole problem with John 4. With Nicodemus that wasn’t so, He was thinking, he was just thinking wrongly and Jesus used a different strategy there. But with this woman, she is so thick, not that she has a low IQ, that’s not the point with young people, it’s not that they have low IQ’s, it’s that they’re untrained, unused brains, some of the circuits haven’t had a charge in them from the time they took their first breath.

And that’s what’s happened to this woman; this woman is thick in the head, and it’s because she’s never been taught to think, and you cannot, I don’t care how many times you sentimentalize about it and talk about the simple gospel and all the rest of the propaganda that goes on. No one can trust Christ until they think at least a little bit about ultimate issues. And even in evangelical circles we have this disparaging of oh, you’d better not learn too much doctrine, you might get spiritually fat. Big sin! And that’s the same kind of attitude that is human viewpoint; that kind of a remark is stupid; that kind of remark comes from a group of people who have been educated in the system not to think, better not read too much of the classics, you might get over-educated, you might strain your brain a little bit. You know, there have been vast mental tests given to man, tremendous mental tests and I’ve never yet heard of a strained brain. Never. I’ve had to grapple with the doctrine of the Trinity and work with it and deal with it to try to teach it and I’ve felt like the top of my head was coming off in trying to work with it but to this day I’ve never strained my brain, and I’ve never heard of anyone else straining their brain; you can’t strain it, all you have to do is use it. It’s as simple as that and it doesn’t come automatically. You don’t come with untrained brains and learn to think; you have got to train yourself to think and discipline yourself to think and that requires effort, tremendous effort at times. And Jesus Christ is devoting, you can just see Him work with this woman, He works with her one way, He works with her another way because this poor woman has never used her mind. She’s just thick

So she recognizes here in verse 9 that something unique is happening, this is a different kind of a Jew than the kind she met and so Jesus kind of puts the carrot in front of her face and He says “If you knew the gift of God,” then you’d ask the right question, woman. But you’re not asking the right question because you don’t know the gift of God yet. In other words, your mind is so fogged and bombed out with human viewpoint, you haven’t got to the place where you can believe because you haven’t got to the place where you can ask the right question and until you do I can’t give you the answer. So then He says now if you did know that, and if you recognized who I am, then you would have asked Me to give you something, and I would have given you, it says in the text here, “living water.” [11, “The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water?”]

Now here is where John is making his little play with the well, and that’s why I showed you that little detail about Jacob’s well. That well is a well that goes down 100 feet into the core around Samaria and it’s fed by an underground stream; it has been fed for 4000 years. Now it just turns out that the word for “flowing water” is also the word for “living water.” And so here we have John taking the word “living” and the word “flowing” and he uses the same word. See what he did, he did this earlier. Of course it’s not John doing it, Jesus Himself is speaking this way but John remembers this and the other men apparently just try to make it more simple. But Jesus uses a word that has two meanings, both of which are true. It’s going to be “living water” because it’s going to be spring up into everlasting life, whatever that is and He’s got to explain that to the woman, but to start off the [can’t understand word] and make it very easy for her, He’s saying I’ll give you flowing water.

Now the woman would have understood this because under the laws of purification the most desirable kind of water was flowing water, not stagnant water, flowing water because the dirt would wash away. And so whether it was the woman undergoing her monthly purification or whether it was dealing with the sacred vessels of the temple whatever it was, flowing water would have been understood. So he says woman, I’ll give you water that cleanses to the uttermost, flowing water. Now in verse 11 we find she doesn’t get the point. She completely misses the point, she just is thick. This is put here to encourage you. I have dealt with people that are so thick, you just wonder, you know, thank God we don’t have to think to breathe or this person would have trouble. And some people I’ve wondered, how can they walk and breathe at the same time. And it’s not because they’re stupid people; I’m not talking about the person with damaged IQ, I’m talking about people who just refuse to think and this woman refuses to think. So Jesus has to back up, so she comes up with this brainy statement, “Well, you’ve got nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.” See, she knows what kind of a well that is, that well has this flowing water and the flowing water is way down at the bottom of it. She says how are you going to get that flowing, you know, it’s 100 feet down there Rabbi, and I’ve got the only thing around here that you’re going to use to let down in the well, you don’t have anything. So she says where are you going to get that flowing water, kind of like a little challenge. She goes on further.

She goes on further and she says, John 4:12, “Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?” She suspects that Jesus Christ…remember the history of this well, 4000 years, up to that time 2000 years, hadn’t run dry yet, and she says you mean to tell me you’re going to give me something better in the way of physical provision. Now look, she’s still missing the point. Jesus is trying to get her to see her spiritual needs but she only insists on seeing her physical needs, and this is what sin does in human viewpoint. You see, we are made as creatures to think over both domains but when we reject our God-consciousness and disobey, and when children are encouraged to do this by the teaching environment in which they grow up, gradually they become discouraged and gradually their mind no longer functions in this area literally. Literally, they put it out of their mind. And from that point on they deal only with their physical needs and their mind is trained only to think in this trivial area, and so you come along and you give them John 3:16 you wonder, hey, how come, it doesn’t register. Look at this woman, it doesn’t register with her and watch how Jesus has to work with her.

John 4:13, He tries another approach, “Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinks of this water” because both of them are looking down the well, that narrow well, she says just look down there Rabbi, it’s a hundred feet deep, so she brought up the well, so Jesus carries on, yes woman, but this water, pointing to the water down there, “whosoever drinks of this water shall thirst again.” Now that was very clever because it at least shows this woman about her physical needs. See, He’s trying to break the chasm and watch how He does it; He’s trying to go from here over to here and so He says okay, at least I can show the woman that her physical needs constantly have to be met from outside of herself. So I’ll try that approach, so He starts saying, Woman, you have to come down here every day don’t you, haven’t you come down here because you’ve run out of water. This kind of water has to be constantly replenished, in other words, it’s finite. That’s what He’s trying to get her to see, He doesn’t use the word, she’d never understand it. But at least He’s trying to get her to realize that she is limited…limited!

So then He adds in John 4:14, “But whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” Now there’s a play on the words in the Greek; in verse 13 the word “drink” is “whoever keeps on drinking this water will keep on thirsting,” but “whoever drinks,” aorist tense, “of the water that I give him will never thirst again.” There’s a contrast between repeated drinking of verse 13 and the once and for all drinking of verse 14. The drinking of verse 14 occurs when a person trusts in Jesus Christ. The drinking of verse 13 occurs as the finite creature constantly is dependent upon physical sources outside of himself. So, “Whoso drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him,” and notice the prevalence of the verb “give,” from the very start Jesus has sewn that little Trojan horse in the conversation, “give,” “give me to drink,” I can’t give you to drink, if you knew who I was you’d have asked Him to give you something, whoever drinks of this water shall thirst again but whoever drinks of the water I give him shall never thirst. Why do you suppose Jesus sewed the word “give” into the conversation right from the very start. He wants this woman to understand salvation is by grace. Grace, “give,” it’s the word of grace and so the very way He has moved the conversation has forced the woman…she probably isn’t even away He’s using the word “give” here. He has gotten her mind to run in the right channel by the way He phrased this conversation. And almost unconsciously, unintentionally the woman is talking about gifts; first step, she’s got at least the giving perspective.

Now He talks about this water and it says, not “shall be” in the Greek but “shall become in Him a well of water,” “shall become in Him,” now what is that, does this mean that when a person trusts in Christ he is given grace, as Roman Catholic theology argues, grace that does not have to be replenished from outside, it’s sort of like God the Holy Spirit gives you two quarts of grace and it’s a perfect fuel that’s never burned up and you don’t need any more. We know that can’t be because the Bible teaches us that after salvation we’re constantly dependent on God outside of ourselves. So what then can mean this water that I shall give…it says “become a well,” and what kind of a well? In the spiritual realm the same kind of well as Jacob’s well, a well that for four thousand years goes on and on and you can always reach down and get water out of it. Why could you reach down and get water out of Jacob’s well? Because water was always coming into the bottom of that well by the stream from outside of the well. And so He says drink of My water, and I tell you when you reach down inside there will always be fresh water coming into it from outside, because you’re in a personal relationship with God, that’s the plan of salvation.

So Jesus picked this well, with peculiar feature in the bottom of it, with a constant replenishing supply that He could then show constantly when a person is saved, yes we’re dependent upon God but the stream constantly comes to us through Christ. And then there’s a further analogy; He doesn’t say that you’ll automatically receive the water in verse 14. Some people read verse 14 as though once we take the drink we never thirst again because the water somehow automatically supplies the thirst, but that’s not what verse 14 is saying. It’s saying it shall become a well; it says, therefore, just like a regular well, yes, you will have to reach down and drink it but the difference will be that it’s available now and it wasn’t before. “Drink of the water that I shall give him,” and that water will come inside you and it will become your own well and you can reach down there and rely upon it, not because of something within you, because that well is supplied from outside of you, just like Jacob’s well was supplied from outside of itself, with a stream of water.

And then it says in verse 14 at the end, “a well of water bubbling up,” literally, “into everlasting life.” “Bubbling up,” there’ll be a violence down at the bottom of that, a sort of urge on the part of the water to be drawn out of the well. This won’t just be a flat stream waiting for you to drop the bucket down until the bucket sown until the bucket slaps against the top of the water and goes beneath it because this water foams down at the bottom of the well, it comes up in vast bubbles, it’s as though the water inside is anxious to be received. And that’s what the word “bubbling” means, it will well up into everlasting life; that’s what I’m going to give you.

Now John 4:14, the poor woman still doesn’t get the point. “The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.” Well, she got at least part of the point, that once she got this water somehow she wouldn’t be thirsty again and she’d have her needs fulfilled but her problem is she’s still thinking in terms of the physical. See what horrible things a life of thinking in human viewpoint does to you. You just become trivial. I notice that, after I became a Christian I went home to some of the people I’d grown up with and we’d get in conversations, and the more I grew in the Word of God the more it seemed I couldn’t carry on a conversation with these people. And I think there’s many of you that have had that same experience because to you it’s spiritual issues that are most on your heart and they’re the ones that you want to talk about and then you get around some brilliant person like this woman at the well and they’re talking about the weather, boy, what bad weather we’ve been having today, just exactly what turns you on. Now weather turns me on too because I like it but I wouldn’t like to talk about just what somebody thinks about it, you want to discuss with me the [can’t understand words] and twenty-four hour prog, that’s great, I’ll be glad to talk about that. But this business of what happened yesterday to so and so when they went out the door and tripped on their little dog or something, and the very profound items of conversation. And this goes on, and the more you get in the Word of God the more you’re going to feel a difference. There will literally be some people in your family that you can’t hold a conversation with more than five minutes; you run out of what to talk about. They’re talking about something that’s absolutely trivial and you sit back and you wonder, my gosh, how can they live in God’s creation and just see this stuff all the time, never see the big stuff. Well when you get that frustrated feeling, just understand, apart from God’s grace you’d be the same way.

And so this woman here, poor woman, still can’t get the point, she still thinks in terms of coming down the hill, you know, slugging it out every day she comes down, drops her little leather bag in the water, pulls it up and goes back up the hill. That’s her life. That’s her life! And Jesus comes across with this mind blowing doctrine and all she think if well, it’ll save a trip down from Sychar, so she still…still hasn’t got the point. And Jesus starts having to work again.

So He starts to take the direct approach in John 4:16; He probably says to Himself, lady if you haven’t got the spiritual now you are asking for it. So He says, “Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come here.” You’re worried about going up the hill, go get your friend and bring him down here. [17] “The woman answered and said, I have no husband.” And in the Greek it’s very quick, He just touched a sensitive issue; oh-oh, and you can sense this woman wants to shut that conversation off real quick. But you see, the poor woman, that’s what she’s been doing all her life. Every time there’s a spiritual need in this woman’s life it’s always I don’t want to, and a little shudder comes down the mind, so she’s trained her mind into stupidity, into triviality, where she cannot even be broached with the gospel because she doesn’t even know the question to ask. And God graciously works, as He does through Christ to bring this woman around so she’ll just ask the right question. And Jesus does not do this, by the way, to humiliate this woman. This is not an act of humiliation, we’re going to see why in a moment as the conversation goes on.

“The woman answered and said I haven’t got a husband. Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband, [18] For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: you said that truly.” Now that sounds like He’s trying to embarrass her but Jesus, we know from the other Gospels, is never one to embarrass us. He only does what is absolutely necessary to bring us around to truth and when He says this to the woman, particularly the last word in verse 18, woman, you did say something “truly” then. Does that mean the woman wasn’t saying things truly before? No, she was saying things truly but they were trivially true. Now what she said is something that’s spiritually significantly true. Now He says, now woman, now you’re talking. Now you’re talking about something that matters spiritually. And so what has He done? He has engaged her God-consciousness in her soul; with this one remark He has demonstrated His glory to this woman.

Now in the King James it sounds kind of facetious in John 4:19, “The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.” Now this is not sarcastic here, she genuinely realizes that she has come across a prophet and next week I’ll tell you what the significance is to that, in Samaria. But right here it’s sufficient to note that she’s discovered something about Christ that she never saw before. She used to see just a Jewish rabbi; now she’s seen a prophet. Why has she seen a prophet? What turned her around and suddenly cells in that woman’s brain that had never worked for 20 or 30 years is suddenly surging with thought; I am face to face with a prophet. For the same reason as Nathanael, turn back to John 1:48, remember how Jesus demonstrated Himself to Nathanael? Nathanael said where do you know me from? And Jesus said, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the tree, then I saw you.” And what does Nathanael say? “Rabbi, you’re the Son of God.”

What has Jesus done? He has come to this [can’t understand word] God-consciousness and He’s revealed His character and she recognizes that this man, she doesn’t know He’s God yet but she identifies Him with God’s plan and God’s Word. And her word is the Nabiim, He is a prophet, God speaks in this man. And how does this woman who was so thick 30 seconds before suddenly the light goes on in her head and she’s face to face with God Himself in the sense of a prophet mediating His Word. How does she know this? Because Jesus has moved the conversation around to address her conscience, to address her God-consciousness, not argue with her, not try to prove Himself to her but simply present Himself to her, just like a mother would present herself to a newborn baby. When a mother has a newborn baby, the baby doesn’t have any problems eventually distinguishing his mother, there’s a built in recognition system in that baby for its mother, and so also here.

There’s a built in recognition system called God-consciousness in your soul that recognizes when God is there, and that’s what’s working at this point. And when that woman crashes through she’s on her way. At this point she’s beginning to believe; Sir, You are a prophet. And when she calls Jesus a prophet she means He carries the authoritative Word of God and the standard of truth is not within her but within His Word. That’s the significance of that last statement, Woman, in this you said something truly. And therefore at this point there’s a signal that starts to operate in the conversation and in our evangelism we want to look for that. The person is beginning to believe at the point you sense they are succumbing to the authority of God’s Word. Not you, because in this case we have to distinguish our message from our self; Jesus didn’t because He was the message and the man together. But when you sense the person is receiving it on the basis of God’s revelation, that’s when faith is happening. There is a succumbing, the person says all right, it’s not my standard of truth, but God’s Word is the standard of truth on me; I’m not judging God, He’s judging me. And so the woman was no longer judging whether what Jesus said was right and wrong, she was saying He knows me, He judges me, I don’t judge Him. And when God had got this woman to the point where in her conscience she bowed her knee to a standard of authority outside of her soul she became a believer. We’ll later on show what happened to this woman and the follow up that Jesus used.

But in conclusion there are some principles and hints for application. In our evangelism we must understand the importance of beginning on the common ground of creature hood. You can start with the human viewpoint starting point and use the indirect approach if the person is very, very hard and turned off. That’s one way, you start with where they are, human viewpoint, and take it to the logical conclusion; that’s operation prodigal son, take them to the pigpen with their own belief system. Don’t try to defend the Christian faith, just take their system out to its logical conclusion, the pig pen. Then when you’ve brought them down there come back and start with divine viewpoint and show them what flows from that position, but don’t crisscross, that’s how you’re going to lose the whole point. You can’t crisscross; you apply the indirect approach.

Now what will often happen, as in this case, where you can’t argue this way. This woman would never have understood this approach; she is mentally too incapable of thought itself, so Jesus has to stop and has to work with a direct approach to here without first going through the indirect approach; He works with the direct approach but He constantly brushes it off, like this is what happened, He starts out with the woman, woman, you’re made in God’s image. He doesn’t tell her that but in essence that’s what it means. Well then if you’re made in God’s image you’re a finite creature, you’re dependent, give me to drink, we both are. So He starts here and then He works on through the conversation until He starts suggesting there’s a gift involved, a gift of God. So He introduces grace; He starts with creation and then He goes to grace, and obviously implying the fall in between. And then He goes from that on to the fact that it says that this water will be infinitely satisfying. And once He said that and got that across to her, that must be God speaking.

But He has trouble doing it until He shows His own nature. Now we can’t prophecy to a person, verses 16, 17, 18, we can’t do that, so what corresponds in our evangelism with this point in Jesus’ conversation. Exposure to the content of the Word of God. It may require, instead of four verses, with someone you’re talking to about Christ, it may require prolonged exposure to the pages of Scripture before the person realizes that the God of this book is the same God they’re looking for in their soul. And the only way they can do it is not have you come to them and tell them all your exciting experiences. Jesus doesn’t relate experiences, He shows Himself and the application is you must show the God of the Bible to people, not our experience, the God of the Bible and His character. If you know your divine viewpoint Framework you’ve got at least 12 or 15 different points you can intercept the pages of Scripture. You can go back and deal with the Mosaic Law, Mount Sinai, you can pull out the Exodus and talk about that, you can talk about David, you can talk about King Solomon, you’ve got a lot of built in materials you can use to show the nature of the God of the Scripture. And by glorifying God, and that’s how you do it, by the way, you show His character through the pages of the Word, then you’re going to have to trust the Lord at that point to open up the God-consciousness of the individual.