This Changes Everything [PART 9] | Mark Pugh | Sunday 7th June

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Well, I'm going to get stuck straight into God's word. This morning we're going to look at John, chapter four together, verses one to ten. And as part of our series on the Gospel of John, today's theme we're looking at is the one who comes looking. And at the end of this, or now, if you want to, there'll be the next slide that's got a QR code and if you click on that or go onto our website rediscoverchurch.com devotional, you can get a six day devotion based on the teaching this morning. And this will help you to work this through in your life in a practical way in the week that is ahead. But I want to start by asking you a question. Imagine that tomorrow God gave you two options. You wake up in the morning and God gives you one of these two options. The first one is he says, the blessings and the successes on your life can double in size. You can have more influence, more opportunities, more reputation, more popularity, more visible fruit than you've ever seen. Sound like a good option? If I can't get an amen to that, then I'm not going to have any chance anything today, am I? Option two, God says, I want you to leave all of that and spend the next season of your life investing in one person. Which would you choose? Don't answer too quickly, because most of us know the right answer. But I'm not sure we know our real answer. Let that settle for a moment because here's an even more difficult question. What if the greatest obstacle to God moving in your life isn't failure? What if the greatest obstacle is success? What if the thing most likely to distract you from God isn't opposition or suffering or temptation? What if the biggest obstacle is fruitfulness? What if the crowds become so large, the reputation so good, that you stop noticing the one? What if ministry has become so important that you stop seeing people? What if busyness for God becomes so consuming that you slowly lose sight of the heart of God? Today we're going to look at John's gospel, chapter four in the first 10 verses. And John begins this chapter with a moment that makes no strategic sense. You see, the context is that Jesus is becoming even more popular. The crowds following him are growing. His influence and reputation is expanding. His movement is gaining momentum. And then he leaves. No announcement, no explanation, no campaign, no attempt to maximize the opportunity. He simply walks away. And where does he go? Not to a city, not to a crowd, not to a synagogue, not to a platform. He goes to A well to meet one broken woman. And in doing so, Jesus reveals something that every believer desperately needs to remember, and that is this. The priorities of God are often completely different from the priorities of people. It can seem that the longer we are followers of Jesus, that mixing up our priorities with God's priorities can become a bit of a cocktail. And this morning, I want you to see the undiluted, uncompromised, clearly presented Jesus and his priorities. And to ask whether we have forgotten in our life what matters the most to Him. Let's look at John's Gospel, chapter four. And it says this. When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was making and baptizing more disciples than John, though Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples were. He left Judea and went again to Galilee. He had to travel through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sycha, near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there. And Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon. A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Give me a drink, Jesus said to her, because his disciples had gone into town to buy food. How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman? She asked him, for Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Jesus answered, if you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, give me a drink? You would ask him and he would give you living water. Let's look at this together. The first thing I want to bring to us today is that Jesus is not driven by human expectations. It says. So he left Judea and returned to to Galilee. There is enormous comfort here. Jesus is completely free from the pressure of public opinion. We hear all the time about politicians who are exploring the desires and the wishes and the popularity of things in our nation and will pin their policies on those things. Jesus does not do that. The Pharisees are watching Jesus. The crowds are growing. Comparisons with John are increasing. Yet Jesus remains utterly secure. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't adjust his course to manage the perceptions. He simply obeys. And because he is our Lord, we also do not have to be driven by comparison, competition, reputation, or the fear of missing opportunities. See, the Son of God was able to leave apparent success because he trusted the Father's direction. A life of trust is a life of surrender, which is a life of obedience not to the crowd, but to your Father in heaven. Notice what the Pharisees are doing. They're counting disciples. And when people use such measurements against our lives, maybe our parents have measured us by our educational accomplishments. Maybe our peers have measured this by our career accomplishments. Maybe in ministry world that I'm in, maybe people measure by the success, the apparent success of ministry. And these measurements, based on the opinions of the crowd, can quietly become the North Star in each of our lives. And we can end up serving a metric rather than a master. But obedience to God is what matters. Nothing else. The opinions of others do not matter. We do not get our value from what other people ascribe to us. We get our value from God. Nothing else matters. And I'm comforted to know that Jesus is not swayed by the crowd or by public opinion. [00:08:38] Speaker B: Church let's be more like Jesus. [00:08:41] Speaker A: Second thing I noticed from this scripture is that Jesus pursues people nobody else notices. Before we are introduced to this woman that is often called the woman of Samaria, Jesus is already traveling towards her. And she's got no idea. This story begins with his initiative. She's not seeking him, he is seeking her. And this is the story of every Christian in this room. Nobody in this room has found Christ. Christ has found you. The comfort is that God is always moving towards people before they move towards him. But notice the journey that he had to take to reach her. He had to travel through Samaria. Now, Jews didn't go through Samaria. There were longer routes, routes that avoided Samaria. And most religious travelers took the longer route gladly. Because Samaria was the place of cultural tension, the place of historical grievance. It had an inherited contempt in the minds of those that were religious. It was the road that nobody wanted to walk, and Jesus walked it anyway. We all have some areas in our lives, places of discomfort, people, groups. We actually avoid communities that challenge our ease, cross cultural conversations. We've been putting off relationships being fractured historically by difference that we keep meaning to repair. And where Jesus walks towards discomfort, we tend to walk around it. Where he crosses borders for reconciliation, we reinforce them for the sake of comfort. Where are the Samarias in your life? Where are those places that you're avoiding? What are those longer routes that you're taking in your life to keep you away from confronting those things that feel uncomfortable to you? Jesus walked through them. [00:11:05] Speaker B: Let's be more like Jesus. [00:11:08] Speaker A: The third thing I notice about this scripture is that Jesus moves towards the marginalized and he calls us to do the same. You see, the woman at the well represents multiple layers of exclusion. She's a Samaritan, she's a Woman, she is socially compromised. She's apparently isolated as a result of that social compromise. And she has come to draw water at a time of day that no one should have been drawing water. She was there at the hottest part at noon, precisely because the other women came in the morning and she was not welcome among them. And yet Jesus deliberately seeks her out. I want to say something directly because it matters in the world that we're living in right now. Jesus lived in highly politicized times. He lived in a nation that had an occupying force, the most powerful force on the world, the Roman occupiers. They taxed heavily, they dispensed injustice freely. There were ethnic tensions in society. There was cultural resentment, there was economic inequality. Some people were so radicalized by this deep sense of injustice that they felt that they became violent insurgents, terrorists, if you like. Simon the zealot. A zealot is like a terrorist, became one of Jesus own 12 disciples. And in that environment, that highly politicized environment, the temptation would have been, as it can be, for us, to divide the world into those who are worth loving and those who are worth fearing, to pull up the drawbridges, to identify the enemies, to see political crisis as the primary crisis. And we have many examples of seeing that in our world today, from the highest office to the lowest. But we don't see Jesus doing that. Jesus doesn't dehumanize anybody. He doesn't stoke fear. He doesn't build a movement on grievance. He moves towards the corrupt tax collector who is sitting in a tree. He moves towards the woman with illness that has made her ceremonially untouchable. He moves towards the man whose friends have just destroyed the ceiling to lower him down to the feet of Jesus. He moves towards the terrorist. He moves towards this outcast woman at a midday. Well, whatever our politics, and I know Christians hold a genuine range of political views on a whole range of policy and governance matters. I don't believe Jesus has a political party. But we must be very careful that our politics do not shrink. Our theology. Christian faithfulness is not about building a kingdom for our tribe. It's about bearing witness to a king who crossed every border to reach people that no one else was reaching. Nobody is beneath Christ's attention in this city. Nobody is too complicated. No one is too broken. No one is too politically inconvenient. Jesus walked towards the most disconnected and the most disenfranchised. So this question for each of us, are we moving towards the marginalized or are we just simply managing our distance from them? Are we helping people see themselves as image bearers of God? Or are we seeing them only through the lens of what they represent to to us? [00:15:22] Speaker B: Let's be more Jesus. [00:15:26] Speaker A: Fourth thing I see in this story is that Jesus enters our weakness and he stays. It says these words, Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. John includes this detail deliberately. The Son of God is exhausted. This anticipates what the writer of Hebrews would later put so beautifully when he says, we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. Christ understands weariness not as a theological concept, but as a physical memory. Many believers often feel secretly guilty for being tired, as if exhaustion is some form of spiritual failure, as if limitation means that you're not trusting enough. But notice this. Jesus is worn out, but yet he is still fully obedient. The woman he is about to change forever meets a tired Jesus. His weariness doesn't disqualify his faithfulness, it becomes the context for it. You and I will all have experiences and know in times when your deepest tiredness encounters an opportunity that could you would prefer to have on a different occasion. Why couldn't this come when I'm feeling strong and feeling well, [00:17:01] Speaker B: I have to [00:17:01] Speaker A: say, on a Sunday, after you've ministered out, you got up early and you've prepared and you've ministered out multiple services, you prayed with multiple people. And then you walk out of the church and you feel like, I have given everything. And then someone shouts, pastor, I've got to say, at those moments you feel not to the level that Jesus felt it, but you feel, okay, I'm spent. But this person needs my attention, this person needs my ears, this person needs my care and my love. And being faithful in those moments is really important. Society has become very, very aware of tiredness, but very unresilient. And we have to be more resilient. Church, I think past generations, they wouldn't say, I can't get involved in that because I've got. I'm tired sometimes. In our weakness. The time of the greatest faithfulness in our life is being tested now. God cares about our tiredness. And if you're really tired, you need to put some things in place in your life to try to help with that. Make sure you're taking a Sabbath. Make sure there is a day in your week that's saying, God, I know that I'm not really the one in control. I'll let you take charge of the wheel. Make sure that there's good rhythms of holidays in your life and there's times of relaxation and rest. Make sure that you've got friends and make sure that you're connecting and make sure you're building relationships. Make sure that you got a rhythm about your life that's a rhythm of rest. Make sure that you're physically well, make sure that you're exercising if you're physically able to. Make sure you're doing these practical things to steward this body and to steward this mind. But tiredness is not a get out from faithfulness and Jesus knows all about it. [00:19:00] Speaker B: Let's be more like Jesus. [00:19:04] Speaker A: Fifth thing I notice in this story is that Jesus offers before he demands. Notice what comes first in his exchange with the woman. Not repentance, not correction, not exposure. What comes first is an offer of a gift. He said, if you knew the gift of God, and who is saying this to you? Give me a drink? You would ask him and he would give you living water. The gospel begins with divine generosity. Christ comes as a giver before he comes as a judge. And while the Rest of John 4 makes clear that he will gently, truthfully surface everything in her life that needs addressing, he leads with grace. And the order is not accidental. John tells us at the beginning of this gospel that Jesus was full of grace and truth in that order, grace and truth. And that order matters. This has implications for how we speak to one another, for how we care, how we witness. Some of you may have seen over the weekend just a video that's been posted by Stephen Bartlett, the Diary of the CEO, and he's probably the most popular podcast interviewer in the world. And he interviews John Lennox, who's a mathematician, Cambridge scholar and a fantastic apologist for the gospel. And if you've not seen that, you need to see it, you need to listen to it. It's about an hour and 20 minutes, hour, 30 minutes long of just Stephen Bartlett asking him questions about faith and society. And you watch this man, who I think is 82 years of age, you watch him giving a gracious, compassion filled, respectful dialogue with this man. He wasn't defensive, he wasn't trying to win an argument. He was trying to operate with this grace and truth [00:21:19] Speaker B: church. [00:21:20] Speaker A: I think over the years we've got this very wrong and we've operated full of truth and grace. We haven't even got round to the grace bit at times because we're so busy working on the truth. And it's not that truth's not important, but truth only makes sense in the Context of grace. We can only live in the realm of truth when we are soaked in the realities of grace. [00:21:42] Speaker B: Jesus led with grace. [00:21:48] Speaker A: Jesus doesn't say, become someone worth talking to, and then I'll talk to you. He sits down at the well with the marginalized. He's already there waiting. And he offers water before he names the thirst. [00:22:04] Speaker B: Let's be more like Jesus. [00:22:07] Speaker A: And the sixth thing, only 25 points today, so we're doing well. The sixth and final thing. Jesus sees what we actually need. You see, this woman came for water. That's what she thought her need was. But Jesus addressed a deeper need in her life. She doesn't know yet that she is thirsty for something more than what she came to get. She has attended this scene at the well at midday with a practical problem and a practical solution. She had the bucket, the rope, and the ritual of daily necessity. And Jesus said, what you came here for is not what you need. I wonder whether you have had that experience with Jesus where the thing that you've been praying for, the answer you have been bringing in prayer. You've not been getting that answer. Because there is something deeper that Jesus knows you need. You are convinced that you need that job. You're convinced that you need that opportunity. You're convinced that you need that provision. You're convinced that you need that friend. You're convinced that you need that relationship. But maybe there's something deeper that Jesus is diagnosing in your life. You've come with your rope and your bucket and you're at your well. But there's a deeper thing that the Lord's wanting to do. See, God often sees beneath the need of our life, the roots behind the symptom, the ache behind the presenting complaint. When we are preoccupied with our circumstances, our finances, our career or our reputation, with, if you like, managing the surface area of our life, we can spend years in prayer, barely scratching the layer beneath which our real hunger lives. [00:24:26] Speaker B: But Jesus is never distracted by our symptoms. [00:24:31] Speaker A: He always goes for the heart. Always. And he recognizes in this woman's life that her real need is not what [00:24:45] Speaker B: that bucket can provide. Her real need is what he can provide. I will give you living water where you will never thirst again. [00:24:59] Speaker A: See, she came to the well to just for the water, whatever occupied her thoughts that morning, whether it's a shame, whether it's the habit of how she'd manage that shame in her life, the plain mechanics of survival. She came for what she thought she needed. And Jesus was already there before she arrived, waiting, tired from the Road, but waiting for her. Isn't that like the whole of the Gospel in miniature form? The one who created every river in the world, sitting at a well, thirsty, waiting for you to show up so he can offer you something that you didn't even know you needed to ask for. She came with a bucket. She left with a Savior. And here is what I want to ask you before you leave today. What did you come here for this morning? What was the thing that you had in your hand? What was it when you walked in? Are you carrying a bucket today? What's the problem that you're turning over the prayer that you've been praying for months, maybe years? The anxiety that's been sitting behind the eyes of your life? What if that's your bucket? What if the living water that Jesus is offering right now in this room is deeper and better, more wondrous and more real than anything the bucket could ever hold? John 4. 28 gives us one of the most astonishing details in the whole story. After she meets Jesus, the text says the woman left her water jar. She forgot it. She forgot her water jar. She didn't need it anymore. She had something better. And here's the invitation to you this morning. Put the jar down, stop coming to Jesus with the list of what you need and come to to him as someone who doesn't yet know what they need and trust that he does. [00:27:24] Speaker B: Jesus left the crowds for you. [00:27:30] Speaker A: He walked through a place that people don't walk through normally. [00:27:35] Speaker B: For you, [00:27:38] Speaker A: he sat down at the well, worn out from the journey for [00:27:42] Speaker B: you, he hung on a cross for [00:27:47] Speaker A: you, he faced the scorn and the shame for you. [00:27:53] Speaker B: And the scripture says it was all for the joy that was set before him for you. This morning. He wants to give you living water where you will never thirst again. If you're able to. Can I encourage you to stand with me? Put your jaws down. Whatever your survival needs and strategies are, just put them down and make a decision not to look down the well, but to look up to your Savior? Why don't you lift your hands and surrender before him and say, jesus, I trust you. I trust that you walk to meet me. You've given yourself to meet me. Father, I pray that your living water will flow through every heart and mind in this place. I pray that those who have felt shameful, those who have felt marginalized, those who have felt rejected, I pray that your spirit will come and cause them to not just find friends in this place, but to find a saviour. Those of us who have been walking this journey for years. Maybe we've stopped understanding what are important to you. Maybe we've made a cocktail of our preferences and listed them with your preferences and we've compromised. Help us to look to Jesus as the model of our life in this wild, wild world we're living in. Help us to not follow an ideology. Help us to not follow an argument, but help us to keep our eyes following a Savior and I pray that living water will flow through every one of our lives in Jesus name.