Come As You Are Series

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

ENGAGE

As a high school sophomore, he was cut from the varsity basketball team after being told he wasn’t good enough or tall enough to play on the varsity team. Using that rejection as his motivation, he worked hard on his game and grew 4 inches before his junior year and made the varsity team. The following year, as a senior, he became a McDonald’s All-American and went on to win a national title at the University of North Carolina and eventually he won 6 NBA Championships and 5 MVP awards.

Michael Jordan worked hard to overcome his deficiencies and become good enough to not only play on his high school team, but also to become arguably the greatest basketball player ever.

TENSION

I think we all admire people like Michael Jordan, who have worked hard to overcome the shortcomings in their lives and the stories of those who have done that motivate us to strive to become better at what we do, too. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that.

But there is a problem when we carry that same mindset over into our relationship with Jesus. With the exception of Biblical Christianity, which I would argue is not really a religion anyway, every single religion in the world is predicated on the idea that if we’re not good enough for God, we need to improve our lives and work to overcome our deficiencies and shortcomings first and then we can approach God. But as we’ve discussed frequently, that is a very frustrating way to live because we can never know for sure if we’re good enough.

And while I’m confident that most of us here would reject the idea of needing to earn favor with God through our good works, I also know that it’s so easy to fall back into that mindset, even for those of us who have put our faith in Jesus.

That is one reason that we’re taking some time to focus on the simplicity of the gospel in our current sermon series – “Conversations with Jesus” – in which we are taking a look at the conversations that Jesus had with some people that are a lot like us.

TRUTH

Last week, we began with the account of Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3. Although Nicodemus was a religious leader, we discovered that he was actually a lot more like us than it might appear at first glance. He sensed that there was something missing in his relationship with God in spite of his outward religiosity and so he came to Jesus and learned that when it came to his relationship with God, what he believed was much more important than what he achieved.

Today, we’ll look at Jesus’ conversation with someone who could have not been more different than Nicodemus:

• He was a man, she was a woman

• He is named, she is not

• He was a Jew, she was a Samaritan (We’ll talk more about that in a moment)

• He was highly regarded, she was well-known, too, but for all the wrong reasons.

And yet, we’re going to find that she, too, needed Jesus to fulfill what was missing in her life.

So go ahead and open your Bibles up to John 4.

Before I begin to read and comment on this passage, I just want to note that there are so many principles that we could take away from this passage, which is probably why a lot of other pastors have devoted anywhere from 3 to 8 or more sermons on just this chapter. But since we’re only going to spend one week on this chapter, we’re going to focus on just one gospel takeaway today.

[Read John 4:1-6]

At this point in His ministry, Jesus did not want to get into a conflict with the Pharisees, so He decided to head back to Galilee, The quickest way from Judea to Galilee was to go through Samaria [Show Map]. But for some reasons I’ll explain in a minute, the Jews and the Samaritans didn’t get along well at all, so many devout Jews would go around Samaria, either taking a much longer route along the seacoast to the west or by crossing over the Jordan River to the east.

But in verse 4, it literally says that Jesus found it necessary to go through Samaria. Some have speculated that was only because He wanted to take the quickest available route – one that would allow Him to make the journey in as little as three days. But as the story unfolds, I think we’ll see that Jesus found it necessary to take that route because He had a divine appointment.