Clough John Lesson 23

Doing the Will of God – John 4:26-38

We are again working with the woman at the well story, remembering that this chapter in the Gospel of John teaches some basic principles of personal evangelism and that these principles are often overlooked in personal evangelism today with the result that our evangelism is weak, with the result that we have many professions of faith and a lot of people dropping off at the wayside because in fact they never did believe, and those who did believer were never followed up with enough doctrine so they could withstand the first satanic assault. So there are at least five principles of evangelism that we have studied so far and we’ll pick up a final sixth one tonight in this passage.

First of all, we’ve noticed that the Lord Jesus Christ began with this woman in the area of their common creature hood. The common ground that Jesus used by way of communication was something they both shared and He did not start it in the areas of ideas, nor in the area of commonly held beliefs. He did not say to the woman at the well, Lady, you have a concept of God, now let me show you that your concept of God leads you automatically to faith in Jewish Messiah. He didn’t use that approach; He started instead with a common ground based on the way the woman was, not on what she believed. She was a creature and she needed water. And therefore God approaches people on the basis of their needs, water, food, love, things that all creatures and all men who have God-consciousness because they’re made in God’s image, all men need, all men understand at least basically what these needs are. They can’t define, as unbelievers, the advanced problems of their needs, their moral needs, their needs for a redeemer, their needs for blood atonement, they can’t identify those but the creature, because of common grace, does maintain some contact with God’s creation and what contact does remain and he doesn’t rebel against wholly are these areas of need. So Christ approaches the woman on the basis of the need of water, showing her creature dependency.

So the first thing is the common ground, a starting point. And what is the starting point when Jesus works with a person? Their creature hood. Second; we have found that the Lord Jesus Christ refused to go further in the conversation than the woman could understand at that time. Jesus Christ did not pressure her, He did not twist her arm, He did not force the gospel down her throat, He did not go into an advanced exposition of all the details of the gospel until this woman was first able to understand that she had some need that she hadn’t thought of, a need that exceeded her need for mere water and food. She had a need for moral cleansing and that was a need she hadn’t thought about in a long time. Until she had thought about that need and until Christ resurrected the need in her mind, there was no sense going any further in the discussion. No sense in going into the gospel; the gospel is an answer and if you haven’t asked the question why bother with the answer.

So that’s the second principle of evangelism, you have to take it only as far as the Holy Spirit happens at that moment to be working with the individual. You just waste your time, you confuse the issue, and just leave a lot of garbage around to go any further with an individual. Now when you’re speaking before a group it’s different; you press as hard as you can because you always press to the point where any person in that group or the person who is going with you can go as far as they can. But on an individual personal basis it’s a wholly different story. You can’t sit and watch Billy Graham in a mass evangelistic situation and how he approaches people in a mass environment and expect you’re going to use the same preaching approach on an individual basis. Billy Graham wouldn’t use the same preaching approach that he uses to a mass of people if he was talking to somebody on an individual basis. On an individual, person to person, face to face basis you tailor it to the individual.

The third principle we’ve seen about evangelism is that faith begins when the gospel message is accepted by the person as the Word of God, absolutely authoritative. If the person has doubts that this message is no more than just the message of some human religion faith has not occurred. Faith only has occurred and we can only tell it has occurred when there is a mental submission to the authority of God’s Word. If that mental submission is not there, if that person is not hungry and thirsting after an authority outside of their own mind, if they’re not submitting their mentality to the judgment standards of the Word of God, faith is not there. “Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” And you can’t say that faith is present until you see some evidence that the person is bowing their intellectual knees before the claims and demands of God’s authoritative word. When you see that, faith has started.

The fourth principle, after this point of faith is reached, the new believer has the right then to, with wobbly legs, walk and try to test and see where this divine viewpoint holds against the evidence of life and history. It is wrong to lead someone to Christ and never give honest answers to honest questions. Jesus gave honest answers to honest questions because this woman had honest questions about this whole Samaritan Jewish controversy. And Jesus didn’t just use what is usually taught in witnessing circles, well just keep the issue to Jesus, don’t stray. That’s false; you must stray because there are times when there are questions that has to be answered and this woman had a question, and Jesus would have left a deformed infant baby at that well had He not gone after she trusted the Word to say all right woman, you trusted the Word, now believe Me when I say this, and then he extended her knowledge and He built the area over which she could believe.

Looking at the top circle, the circle of our position in Christ, our positional sanctification, this is what it means when it says in the New Testament you are “in Christ.” That occurs at a point in time when the Holy Spirit regenerates, when God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit do their work; when God the Father, it’s evident that He is called, that He is justified, that He will certainly glorify; God the Son it is evident that He has given and offered His absolute righteousness that this woman now shares in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the work of God the Son. And then God the Holy Spirit, as we’ve seen by the acrostic, RIBS, regenerates, indwells, baptizes and seals, and all of this occurs at a point in time.

All right, this is the work, the position, the woman is already insecure in that position, but the woman has a bottom circle, the sphere of her experience, the sphere over which she can believe. And when we first trust the Lord the area over which we can trust Him is very, very small, so the objective is since faith is dependent on the Word, it’s to expand the radius of that circle and how do you expand the radius of the circle? By putting Bible doctrine into the mentality of the individual’s soul, by exposing them to divine revelation, which Jesus did, and He spent considerable time in this conversation, telling this woman about things. In fact, He did such an excellent job of presenting this woman with the content of revelation that as we will see tonight, she outgrew the disciples; an amazing thing that happened to this woman. She grew extremely rapidly, but it’s important to notice this is not the norm for every convert. Yes, this woman did witness a few minutes after she became a Christian, it’s an unusual case though. And the reason it’s an unusual case is because Jesus Christ found a woman who had been utterly stripped of her religious legalism and could work on a grace basis and this woman picked this up very rapidly whereas the disciples who are with Christ for months and months and months had failed to pick this up because they still had a degree of religious legalism in their thinking.

So the fourth point of evangelism is this follow up, is this expansion of the circle and the bigger that circle can get and the faster it can get bigger, then the more potent that new Christian’s faith will be, the more confident, the more settled they will be in their faith. If it involves giving intellectual evidences for why Christianity is true and why all other philosophies and religions are false, then so be it, but whatever it takes, it must be done. If you’re interested in following up new Christians, if you’re looking for evidences, you’ll find the specific evidences in John McDowell’s book and you will find the arguments in the Framework pamphlets to use those evidences.

Then the fifth principle, where the cycle is completed, this woman begins to witness. In this case the witnessing occurs a few moments after she trusts the Lord. Now in John 4:26, [“Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”] Jesus Christ has just made a dramatic announcement; an announcement which unless you study the original languages you fail to be impressed with because it’s just not that obvious in the English translation, at least not in my King James. She goes down through the conversation and she really knows that He’s a prophet and He’s Messiah because we know from Samaritan theology what she was saying, and she has that very last point in the conversation, she says well, I know when Messiah comes He’s going to tell me all things. She already knows He had just told her all things and so what she’s really saying is, You are the Messiah, aren’t you?

That’s the spirit in which that question was asked, You really are the Messiah, aren’t you? And He retorts by making an announcement that He did not make in Jerusalem, He did not make in the temple, He did not make in the city of Jerusalem around the temple, nor did He make this in Judea, nor has He ever said this yet to any of His disciples. What does He say? Ego eimi, I AM! With that Jesus the very word that God used to Moses in Exodus 3. Moses at the burning bush said well, God, whose name shall I say Your name is, and God says I AM, that’s My name, I am the one who is with you. And the word “Yahweh” that is used, translated in your Bibles as Jehovah, I always get a laugh out of Jehovah’s Witnesses on this point, because if there’s any way God’s name is not it’s certainly is not Jehovah. Here’s why; in the Hebrew it looks like this, that’s the Tetragrammaton, it’s backwards writing, this is Y, this is H, this is Va and this is H. Now reverse the letters, YHVH. Now we don’t know what happened to the vowels because over history the Jews thought of that word as so sacred they wouldn’t pronounce it. Ron had an experience while were in Israel, said something about Yahweh to somebody and they ooh ooh, and he found out that they don’t like you to use this word for God, this is a sacred word. They may be an apostate state but they have respect for this word even to this day. Now this word we know from linguistic evidences, at least the first vowel is “a” and it’s a guess that the next one is “e” and this is why it is called Yahweh, Yahveh, and it comes form the same verb to be, I AM, the Hebrew word, the verb looks like that, I AM, or Yahweh is, He is the One who is.

Now what has happened and where we got Jehovah in the English language was there was another word the Jews used, “Adonai,” and when you go to a synagogue and hear them read Scripture, every time they come to the Tetragrammaton they don’t say Yahweh, they say Adonai. Well, Adonai is not what the Hebrew is saying here; Yahweh is what the Hebrew is saying there. So what they did is they took these vowels and put them up here in between those four Hebrew letters. So you have the first vowel, the next one, and “ia” which comes over as “e” and so we have Jehovah and for short and because of phonetic reasons it turns out Jehovah. Well, that’s where Jehovah came from; it is the vowels taken from Adonai and put onto the Tetragrammaton. But the vowels of the Tetragrammaton can’t be that be that because those are the vowels of Adonai. So Jehovah is not God’s name, it’s just a convenient thing we use in Scripture. It’s awful silly that one cult makes a whole big thing out of pronouncing God’s name, but that’s like all cults, they always major on the minors and minor on the majors.

Let’s go to John 4:27. “And upon this came his disciples, [and marveled that he talked with the woman: yet no man said, What seekest thou? or, Why talkest thou with her?]” now there’s a humor in this text and it’s again one of those places where the Holy Spirit very quietly and very methodically is ridiculing something. You see, the disciples show up just as He said ego eimi, right then, the Greek is very strong here, just at that point. They’re coming up, they’re coming up to this woman and He has uttered a profound statement, just like somebody, “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” a tremendous statement, and they walk up and they’re wondering why He’s talking to a woman at the well, real perception… And the whole conversation here, they’re worried about why Jesus was talking to a woman and when can we eat. These are the overriding concerns of these disciples at this point. And the text points out, Jesus has just imparted a knowledge of Himself and the essence of God to this woman. And along come the clods that should have known better.

So at this time “came His disciples and they were shocked,” the word “marveled” is shocked, absolutely shocked that He talked with “a woman,” not “the woman.” The fact that He would talk with a woman was the shock. Let me read you what the rabbis at this time in the Mishnah were teaching about fellow rabbis talking to women. “A man shall not be alone with a woman in an inn, not even with his sister or his daughter, on account of what men may think. A man shall not talk with a woman in the street, not even with his own wife, and especially not with another woman on account of what men may say.” Sort of like Christians today who take 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14 and say well, we’d better not do anything that might offend our brethren, cause them to stumble. That’s not the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 8 or Romans 14. But you’ll see a lot of Christians do this and they back over, we’re not supposed to do anything that offends somebody.

Look at this passage carefully; Christ deliberately does something that offends people and He offends the believers, the unbelievers aren’t shocked with this, they never are. This business about don’t take a drink or something, it might ruin your testimony, listen, the unbeliever could care less, they don’t care if you take a beer, it’s some of the nitwit Christians that are upset about something like that. Unbelievers are at least straight enough so that they don’t bother with stuff like that, they’re relaxed, but it’s the uptight legalists that are always worried about something like that.

And here we have Jesus Christ breaking the rabbinic rule. This was the rule for the rabbis, you never do this in public. Now the Word of God didn’t say a thing about that, not a thing. So Jesus… to heck with it, if it isn’t in the Word I’m not going to follow it. Wait until you get in Matthew, watch what He did out in the fields; anything that wasn’t in the Mosaic Law, go ahead, go out in the field and if you want a snack from the grain you go ahead and take it and if it offends somebody, the hell with them. That’s the attitude; you don’t allow some legalist to bully the way you believe and the way you don’t believe. That’s what some people can’t stand about the people in this congregation; every once in a while, does so and so go to your church? I know exactly what’s coming next. Well you know, I so and so and they actually took a beer. And I always, when I have an opportunity, say fine, you show me one text in the Scripture that says they’re not supposed to, show me one; I dare you to, challenge you to. I’ve challenged about four or five clergymen in this town and I’ve challenged about twice that number of laymen and no one has ever come up with a Scripture yet. Now this is not an excuse to go out and get soused, this is just simply telling you that there are norms and standards in Scripture for which we are held accountable and then there are the things that men add to Scripture and we are not held accountable.

And here, this rabbinic ruling that I just read you, that comes out of the Misnahic writings was prevalent in this time and that’s why the shock, because the disciples have taken the Word of God that they have taken the Word of God that they have learned, Old Testament plus a little bit of the New Testament that they’ve learned from Christ, plus legalism. Now I want you to notice what happens to legalism here. You have the situation where these disciples have gone up, here’s your Mount Ebal, here’s Mount Gerizim, Jacob’s well is located at the intersection of this valley in the plain that’s out on the east side of these two mountains, the trunk road of Jerusalem comes up this way, Sychar is located there. Jesus is resting here, He has sent the disciples up about a mile and a half to two miles up the road to Sychar and they’ve come back down, they have met dozens of people, they even met the woman coming the other way because they had left the well before she got to the well.

Now who was it that was doing the witnessing? The legalists or Jesus Christ? Legalism kept them from evangelizing; it also kept them from seeing the whole point of what Jesus was doing; He has just made this dramatic announcement and they’re worried about the fact that He transgressed one of the legalistic hang-ups. This is always the way it is; always the way it is. I’ll never forget the first night when we got into one of the Samuel things; I saw groans, you could just see people groan if you can imagine that, and certain people always sit in the same place and when I hit one of those texts I always kind of look around and see what’s happening, and sure enough, I saw it written all over their face that night, and I was going to see what would happen so every time we hit the text I’d turn up the volume a little bit and make sure they heard, and finally after four or five months they couldn’t take it and took off. Good riddance as far as I’m concerned because these kind of people are just like the disciples, they’re always worried about some stupid thing instead of the content and the essence of Scripture.

Here Jesus Christ has just made a revelation about Himself, ego eimi, I AM, He has used the Old Testament name for God and they’re worried, oh, you didn’t follow the rabbinic standards. Well who the hell cares about the rabbinic standards. God didn’t put those in the Word; if God wanted the rabbis to act this way He would have outlined it in the Torah. He never did and therefore they don’t have to. So, notice what they did then. And this is always another thing that happens. “He talked with a woman: yet no man said, What are you seeking? or, Why are you talking with her?” Because you see, faced with the choice between the Word of God and the word of legalism there’s something that rebukes the conscience of this kind of a person and usually what happens in a Christian group, they put their tail between their legs and go sulking and pouting off some place, to get on the telephone tomorrow and spread it around to about 25 other people. And this is the way they act, always have, always will. Well, no difference then and so they kept their mouth shut, but they were thinking this. How do you suppose John knows they were thinking this? Probably because he was thinking this. Remember, John was here when all this happened, this is an eyewitness account, he knows what they were thinking, because I thought that.

John 4:28, “The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, [29] Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” Now here is a dramatic thing; the woman has come down from Sychar, she has come down from that village that day to get water, physical water. She had no inkling that she was in that great degree of spiritual water or eternal life. Because Christ presents the Word of God, presents His own character to her, she is so completely changed in her outlook that the physical water that she came to get, she walks back and completely forgets it apparently. Apparently this woman is so taken with what she has got, something that has filled her soul for the first time in her life. For years this woman has lived, for years this woman has faced the trials and pressures of life and for years she’s been frustrated, not knowing which way to go, where to turn. Suddenly she came to that well and met the Son of God face to face and walks away completely forgetting the water that she came for because now she has water that she didn’t [not sure of word], the water of everlasting life.

So she goes into the village. Now Jesus lets her go at this point, He doesn’t stop her because you see, in verse 26 He had been talking to her; the picture is that He and the woman are there by the well talking with one another and the disciples come up and kind of the picture you get is that they just kind of stand there, waiting to see what’s going to happen next. And the woman, perhaps maybe out of fear or maybe she just doesn’t know what to do at this point, she says I’ve got to tell the men anyway and this is a good break, His friends have come here so I’ll just leave my waterpot and go and she took off. Now Jesus let her take off and He didn’t follow her up any more for several reasons.

First of all, He knew He’d see her again and He knew He’d have another opportunity of teaching this woman more about the Word of God. That was enough for now, she’d gotten the basic lesson and she’d understood the grace principle that salvation is a free gift. And then the second reason is because He had a problem with His own disciples. This woman was going to trigger a revival and his own disciples were worried about sandwiches. And in this situation it called for some straightening out first in the home base; get His own people straightened out before they could reach for other people. So He had a little tactical problem of solving things at home first.

So he lets her go and she goes up to the village, and when she goes up to the village she phrases her witnessing in such a way that we know something else about this woman. We know how rapidly this woman’s soul had absorbed the Word of God, that water, soaked it up like a sponge, because she goes up to the village, and the very thing that won her to Christ she gives as an evidence. I came to this man and He told me all that I ever did. Now considering the background of the woman that’s given in the passage, she made herself socially vulnerable in witnessing for Christ that way, very vulnerable. And for a woman with a guilty conscience about her past, as she inevitably had because you remember when Jesus brought the subject up she tried to stop Him. For her to go then, facing the men, notice she goes to the men of the village, and she says “I have seen this man who told me all things that I ever did,” and they’d say yeah lady, I betcha what he told you. But she was vulnerable to that. Now why would this woman have the courage to go back up to the hill to the men of the village that knew all the background and say something in this way unless coming face to face with Christ had so cleansed her soul of her guilt that she didn’t care any longer what men thought of her background because she knew before God she was clean, and therefore because she was so thoroughly grace oriented she didn’t care what men would say or the snide little remarks that the religious people would make. She was a thoroughly secure woman as she went back and she’s focusing on the person of Christ, being grace oriented, “Come, hear this person, for He has told me everything that I have ever done, a tremendously confident woman now, confidence to face the whole village, open to face all the gossip and the criticism that must have accompanied this incident.

And then she adds the last of verse 29, keeping her position very carefully, somewhat like Abigail did when she came before David, she doesn’t tell the men that this dogmatically is the Christ, because some of you ladies have never understood that if you address men that way that is the quickest way of turning us off. You may tell us that red is red and it may be demonstrated with 15 scientific proofs but that tone of your voice turns us off. So what does she say? She doesn’t come up, hey, I found the Christ, you gotta go down there! No, she asks a question, “Don’t you think that this is the Christ.” And with that she said the same thing but she’s kept her position as a woman, without usurping the initiative of the male, yet at the same time she’s communicated the gospel to the men; a very wise woman.

John 4:30, “Then they went out of the city, and came unto him.” So you get a tremendous response on the part of this woman. And from verse 31-38 you’ve got the crash program in straightening the disciples out so they can handle this influx of inquirers, we would say in modern evangelistic circles, so here are eight verses that relate to straightening legalistic believers out so that they will be in a position so they can evangelize.

John 4:31, “In the mean while,” while all this is going on, “His disciples” it says in the King James, “prayed him,” it means begged Him, it’s in the imperfect tense in the Greek which means they went on and on and on and on and on. Now we can’t be for sure what Christ did at this point but apparently He was quiet; maybe He was standing there at the side of Jacob’s well looking up at Sychar, watching with His eyes the woman go up the path, and maybe with very, very clear vision, notice the commotion that was happening up in the village on the hill, but whatever he was doing, He evidently wasn’t talking with the disciples. And the disciples had just come back to bring lunch because after all, that was the whole point why they’d stopped there in the first place. And so they kept on, kept on, kept on, kept on, kept on “saying, Master, eat, Master eat, Master, eat,” this isn’t one command. The Greek says they kept on saying this to Him, come on, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. Now there are two reasons, probably, why they are doing this; one, they were hungry but number two there was just a custom that students could not eat before their teacher. And so there was a little vested self-interest, come on Lord, eat so I can. Now the Lord caught this little nuance in their expressions, they weren’t overly concerned with Him being hungry, they were just simply concerned with filling their own stomachs at that moment and He understood this. And this leads to the food discourse.

He has just given the water discourse to the woman, she’s come seeking water; they have come seeking to eat food. He has taken advantage of both opportunities to teach doctrine. In the first case He has not talked to the woman about the food, that will come later. Right here he’s talking to the disciples about food and not water because they’ve already heard the message of the water, they’ve already become Christians, they’ve already understood that to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ gives you the water of everlasting life. That has all been understood, that’s past. They understand it’s a gift, but now they must go on to learn something else after salvation.

John 4:32, “But he said unto them, I have food to eat that ye know not of.” The woman had come looking for water and He said I have water that you know not of and now He says essentially the same thing to the disciples. And by saying that “you know not” implies at this point they have not gone on in their sanctification, it has momentarily been halted, and now is the time for further advance. And I want you to notice how they respond in verse 33. We kind of indicated with the woman when Jesus kept talking about the water, remember what we said; she kept thinking, this poor woman was just slow, just kept thinking only in terms of physical water; she had no idea of this spiritual water. And Jesus had to keep bringing the conversation back, keep bringing it back. Remember in John 4:11, “The woman said unto Him, Sir, you have nothing to draw with, the well is deep, where re you going to get that moving water.” In verse 12 she said “Are you greater than our father Jacob….” In verse 15 she said, “Sir, give me this water that I thirst not and don’t come to this well to draw any more.” Remember how Christ finally had to say woman, get your husband, because the only way He could break her of this obsession of thinking just in the mundane, in the common every day categories of life. Now that was the woman at the well, the dumb Samaritan woman.

Now He turns around to the disciples who have had the benefit of listening to the Nicodemus discourse, John the Baptist discourse, and after He talks about food what’s their brilliant response? John 4:33, “Therefore said the disciples one to another, Has any man brought him something to eat?” Real perception, it’s no better than the woman’s perception and that’s very interesting because that’s the truth about our sanctification; in this growth, we indicate our Christian growth here by a circle, our sanctification can be demonstrated as that circle expands in terms of the chart we usually draw. Now maybe you’ve never thought of it but all of us are built this way, that at the edge of that circle, I always conceive of that circle after 1 John 1:9 as a spotlight shining down on a stage and the stage is totally dark and you just have that area of the stage that is illuminated by the spot and as that spot gets bigger and bigger you see more and more things that are on the stage. Well, we are just as stupid about what lies beyond our present level of sanctification as these disciples are. You see the woman, without illumination, couldn’t have thought at any higher levels than that and so the disciples, they’d already learned about the water but they hadn’t learned about the food and they were just as stupid at the edge of their sanctification as the woman was at hers.

Why are we all stupid like this? Because we’re fallen creatures and the Bible says we have eyes and we see not, ears and we hear not, and a heart that does not understand. That’s the desperately wicked totally depraved human heart. So when you see this verse 33 it’s funny, and the Holy Spirit is making fun here but He’s also being serious and we ought to take that to heart; that’s us. When the Lord wants to teach us something we have to go through the same old thing, the plain every day stuff and then the Lord keeps going over and over and over, bringing situation, bringing doctrine and then finally it clicks. Why didn’t I think of that before; why didn’t I see that before? Because we weren’t illuminated before. So the same thing is happening here; they are thinking in terms of physical things so Jesus in John 4:34 goes on and starts to work with them like He just got through working with the woman. “Jesus said unto them, My food is to do the will of him that has sent me, and to finish the work.” Now this is entirely different from the message He gave to the woman. The water was what? It was a gift, but the food that He’s talking about here is not a gift, it involves work and effort. “The will of Him that sent Me,” that’s obedience, loyalty to God or sanctification. That’s my food; my food is to grow spiritually; my food is to be loyal to God in every area of my life; my food is to increase my sanctification; that’s my food. And to finish it. Notice how that’s added in verse 34 at the end, “and to finish the work,” not just start it and leave it off but to finish what God has given me to do.

Now in John 4:35 He borrows on something He probably learned as a boy in Nazareth, and that was, “Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.” Now the saying of verse 35, “Say ye not” is plural, and it means this was a common Palestinian agricultural saying; it refers to the spring crop and He’s saying that when you sow the crop you must patiently wait till the time of harvest, 120 days later. And you know, He says, from having lived in this area all of your life you know that that’s an expression of patience, that between the time of the sowing and the time of the interval is a set interval and you have to wait until you make your money from the crop. Why would a farmer be impatient to reap? Because that’s where he gets his money from, to reap. And so the saying was current among the Palestinian farmers, you can’t get your money for four months, so don’t get upset, you’re just going to have to relax, sit back and wait four months before you get paid. That’s the economics of this illustration. But Jesus says you “Lift up your eyes, and you look at the fields, and they’re white already.” White already? Yes, because the clothes of the Samaritan colonists were white, and they were starting to come down that hill so that we can get this more on our mind let’s look at that hill and look at the modern Arabic settlement where Sychar was. [he shows slides] Jesus is located down here with the disciples; they’re looking up this way at that village; it’s about a mile and a half. And they see men coming down and the whole village begins to come down. The Samaritans had their own particular clothing.

Now it’s important to realize that the fields were also nearby and these are the fields that were ripening. They hadn’t yet ripened and so therefore the farmers were waiting, they were doing nothing, they were waiting in patience in order that the crop be harvested and they receive their money. And so Jesus said now, He says, I want you to understand something; in the kingdom of God there is no waiting time for your wages; you can start getting paid right away. In the kingdom of God it’s different than in secular business. Wages can be paid as quickly as you are willing to obey God’s Word. And then He goes on and in a way He rebukes them and shows what a great thing the woman is doing.

John 4:36, “And he that reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit unto life eternal: that both he that sows and he that reaps may rejoice together.” Now translated out of a participle, what He’s saying is that the reaper is already receiving wages, it’s a present tense. The reaper receives wages and she’s already doing it. He illustrates it by a masculine participle because it’s a principle but there’s a nuance to His words that disciples, you’re sitting here, hungry like I am. Fifteen or twenty minutes ago that woman came to me and I had to forgo My lunch because I wanted to talk to her about Myself, about the plan of salvation. You come down here and you’re concerned about your food, and I tell you, you’d better drop your lunch where it is because there’s some work to be done and it’s coming right down the hill now. Now is an opportunity to earn wages and you don’t wait four months to be paid; Christ says you can be paid right away; in fact He says the woman is already being employed, she’s already earning her wage, she left her waterpot right there, it’s right there at the well. Why don’t your leave your box lunches right here, like she did her waterpot and get with the program. So “he that sows and he that reaps rejoice together,” the illustration of the fact that there is no time interval in God’s program, necessarily. The sowing is the preparation, the reaping is the actual seeing people come to Christ.

Now some of you have been involved in evangelistic organizations that stress very well the area of evangelism, but I want you to notice there’s another theme that runs piggy-back to the theme of evangelism in Scripture and that is that people do not respond to evangelism unless before there has been some sowing. And what was the sowing in this woman’s mind that occurred before that revival broke out. The Bible is not naïve, you just don’t go knocking on doors in Samaria and put off a revival; there’s a cause/effect behind this. Who did the sowing? Well, let’s think about that woman for a minute; what were the influences in her life? Moses, remember the Samaritans, they read enough of Moses, that’s why the woman could say in verse 19, “I perceive you as a prophet,” where’d she get that from? Deuteronomy 18, Moses’ writings. So who had sown to this woman? Moses had sown to the woman. Who else had sown to the woman? Maybe John the Baptist but at least we can say Jesus had sown to the woman. And now there’s going to be some reaping.

In other words, there is a pre-evangelism that goes on in Scripture and this is why I believe we do not see a greater response to the Word of God in our generation. This generation has not had it’s total spiritual foundations wrenched yet. We have not, as Christians, challenged the opponents at every point, that they’re all screwed up in the area of origins, they’re all screwed up in the area of Law, they’re completely mistaken as to the goals of education, their whole kingdom is falling apart at every point because at every point they have denied the Word of God. There has got to be a total complete confrontation between the Word of God and the word of darkness, and only when that happens do you set off waves that gradually vibrate men and shake them into a decision. And here’s what happened with this woman; she was shaken to the very roots, and as a result the city was shaken. The sowing had been very, very skillfully done and now the reaping would occur.

John 4:37, “And herein is that saying true,” Jesus said; in other words part of that saying in verse 35 is correct, “One sows, and another reaps.” But Jesus says where it’s incorrect is that you don’t have to sit around investing before you get returns on your investment. See, the farmers probably had the same problem they do now. At the sowing they’re investing money in the crop and they don’t get their money back until the reaping. And Jesus says that’s not the way it is in the kingdom of God; you can get money back as much and as instantly as you put it in. And you’ve got an opportunity now, disciples, to just put your lunch down and forget your hunger and invest money and immediately you’re getting your wages back.

John 4:38, “I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labor: other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors.” You haven’t, in other words, at this point Jesus is saying you guys didn’t invest a thing, I did, I was the one that invested the time just half an hour ago talking to that woman; Moses was the one who invested the time of writing the Scriptures and the men, whoever they were that taught her, they’re the ones that sowed, they’re the ones who invested, now you guys are going to collect on their investment; you haven’t done any of the sowing. See, you’ve got a double incentive to start here, you benefit from somebody else’s investment. And notice He uses the word labor twice, three times in verse 38 because this involves effort. Reaping a crop and taking it in is work and this is why Jesus does not bring up the issue of labor to that woman; for her what was the water? The water was free because it was salvation, always free. You don’t give something to God to get salvation; it’s completely given to you as Jesus Christ gave that woman the water. But now to the disciples who are already in the camp of the saved, to them the issue of labor does come up because to them there is the matter of investing the time, talent and resources to gain things back, eternal reward. That’s what it says in verse 36, what are those wages? “fruit unto life eternal,” true we don’t enjoy them right at the moment and true we don’t enjoy them until eternity but the wages are credited to our account immediately upon the investment.

Then the result, John 4:39, “And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.” Next time we’ll get into why this city responded the way it is and what happened later on. All of this would never have happened if Christ first had not dealt with the legalism of His own disciples. You see, when they walked up that path, up to the village of Sychar, they saw that same woman but they had followed the legalistic non-Scriptural taboo that said men ought not to talk with women in public. So this woman’s need would have gone perpetually unanswered if everyone in the vicinity had followed the legalistic taboos But Jesus, because He didn’t interpret the Bible like most Christians do in this area, Jesus was not afraid to offend His brethren when it came down to an issue of the Word of God, and so therefore He broke with the tradition that a rabbi ought not to speak to a woman and as a result led her to Himself. This woman’s salvation, in a way, was dependent on somebody breaking through the barrier or legalism.

Our Father, we thank you that…..