Let Jesus Meet Your Needs

Let Jesus Meet Your Needs

John 4:1-29 (Reading vs. 1-14)

Sermon by Rick Crandall

Grayson Baptist Church - Oct. 19, 2014

*One day years ago, I was driving up Hwy 165 with Becky and Eric. She was about 15, and he was about 12. As we drove by, we noticed that they were tearing down the old Ramada Inn in Monroe. I said something about it, because that was our honeymoon hotel.

*Eric started thinking about the fact that we had our honeymoon in our hometown of Monroe, and he asked, "Were y'all poor back then?" Becky replied, "Yeah. They were dirt poor!"

*Well, maybe we were, but it didn't seem like it. And you can have all the money in the world, and still lack the most important things: Faith, hope, love, comfort, rest and peace.

*So whether we have ten dollars or ten million dollars, we will still have needs. And Christians: God has promised to meet our needs. In Philippians 4:19, the Apostle Paul gives us this sure promise: "My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus."

*God has promised to meet our needs. -- Will you let Him do it?

1. First: Let Jesus meet your need for a friend.

*This Samaritan woman at the well needed a friend. She needed someone to love her, someone to care about her. One clue to her loneliness was the time of day she went to draw water.

*In vs. 6-7:

6. . . Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

7. A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink.''

*This Samaritan woman came to draw water at the sixth hour, and that was straight-up noon in the heat of the day. Nobody came to draw water then. But she came when she would be alone, probably because she had been rejected by her neighbors. She came to the well in the heat of the day to avoid their gossip and stares.

*That woman needed a good friend! We can also see this truth in her troubled past. Jesus brought her past out into the open in vs. 15-18:

15. The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.''

16. Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come here.''

17. The woman answered and said, "I have no husband.'' Jesus said to her, "You have well said, 'I have no husband,'

18. for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.''

*This troubled woman had a long history of broken relationships: Five failed marriages and a current relationship too weak for commitment. Think of the angry, hateful words she must have heard. Think of the rejection and abandonment she probably went through. Each failure pulled her farther down, until maybe she gave up on the possibility of real, unselfish love.

*But Jesus loved her. He wanted to be her Friend.

[1] And we can see the Lord's love in His walk.

*Verse 4 tells us that Jesus "needed to go through Samaria," and the reason why He needed to go there was to save this woman at the well. Samaria was the last place most Jews would go. To get from Judea to Galilee, most Jews went the long way around on the other side of the Jordon River. They took a more difficult road and almost doubled the 70-mile walk just to avoid the Samaritans.

*Jesus could have done that, but He went through Samaria, because He cared about this woman. He loved her. The fact that Jesus came down from Heaven, and walked on the earth at all was because of love.

*Verse 6 also tells us that Jesus walked until He was weary. He was willing to go the distance for this woman, because He loved her, and wanted to be her Friend.

[2] We see the Lord's love in His walk. -- And we can hear it in His talk.

*This woman was shocked when Jesus asked her for a drink of water. Listen to her answer in vs. 9: "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?"

*Most Jews wouldn't even talk to Samaritans, and that hatred was mutual. It was a racial and religious divide that started hundreds of years earlier, when the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians. The Jews who were left in Samaria inter-married with those outsiders. So to the Jews of Jesus' day the Samaritans were "half-breeds."

*On top of that, this was a woman. And it's hard for us to relate to this today, but to the Jews of that day, talking to a woman in public was a big "no-no." And no devout Jew would be caught dead talking to a notorious sinner like this.