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The fourth chapter of John is a very familiar event to us. Most of us are very familiar with the woman at the well. So we should just be able to fly right past it, right? Wrong—because, like every other event in this book, this one is rich. It is full of truths about people and about how best to reach them. It is full of tips and techniques and theological truths. And tucked neatly in the middle of it all is a discussion about worship. If you want a way to sum up the application of this chapter, it’s like this. This chapter teaches us as Christians how to interact with people. It also teaches us how to interact with God. Now it’s going to take us several weeks to unpack everything this chapter has to offer us. And even then we won’t get it all unpacked. But I trust that over the next several weeks that each of us will be able to apply the truths that we will discover as we go along. One of the things that will help you in doing that is to read this chapter several times over the next few weeks as we go along. The more familiar you are with the text itself, the more benefit you will draw from the teaching that it contains. For those of you who were here for the watchnight service, I think we all had a wonderful time. It is always a special highlight of my year to gather together with God’s people and pray in the New Year. But right before we gathered around the sanctuary and held hands and prayed, I got to preach. I got to preach, but it wasn’t really a typical sermon. It turned out to be more of a challenge to the church. Of course, it was late and the whole church wasn’t there. There are more of you here this morning. I’m not going to go over all the challenge from the pulpit this morning, but I want you to make sure and get a copy of the newsletter. Take it home and read it, because I’ve got it all outlined in there. Just a word about it. A challenge is exactly that—it’s a challenge. It’s not a dictatorial mandate. It’s not a new program that the pastor is going to push through. The challenge will only be as successful as you make it. I am the undershepherd of this flock. I’m not the cow herder. Shepherds lead, they don’t drive. I make green pastures available and do my best to keep the wolves away. I don’t force feed and manipulate and push and whip and drive. It is my prayer that in 2009, we peacefully feed on the green pasture that is before us in this challenge. Like I said, I’m not going to go into every part of the challenge—you can read it for yourselves. But I am going to talk about one part of it. Because it fits so well with this passage we’re going to be in for the next several weeks. Sometime within the next few weeks, we’re going to start a bi-weekly church-wide visitation program. I’m hoping that we can alternate between a daytime and an evening time visitation. I want to be strategic in the way we do it. I want to be smart about it. I want an evangelism director to help me organize and promote it. And I want everybody to participate—no matter how scared, or shy, or backward, or busy, or whatever you might be. God is good. He has seen fit to line up the timing between preaching through this passage focused on evangelism… and the timing of beginning to put together a purposeful, strategic outreach program. This isn’t my timing—it’s God’s. But God’s timing is always right. And if He’s seen fit to line these things up, then I think we’d better listen to what He’s trying to tell us, don’t you?
As I said, this is a very familiar event. Jesus and His disciples had been in Judea, just down the river from John the Baptist… and they had been doing the same thing John was doing. They were baptizing people. John the Gospel writer gave us a little insight into what John the Baptist’s disciples were thinking in a conversation that closed chapter 3. They were jealous of the success of Jesus’ ministry. But that was just the opportunity that John needed to explain to them again what the true nature of his ministry was. The true nature of his ministry was to point people to Jesus. It was to point people to the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. It was for the focus on himself to decrease in order that the focus might increase on Jesus. It was all about pointing people to Jesus. It was all about reaching the lost. It was all about showing a lost and dying world their need for a Savior. And then pointing them to the only One who could save them. And as it turns out, that little incident with John the Baptist serves as the glue that holds two other events together in the text. Right before it, you have Jesus’ encounter with a lost person. And right after it, you have His encounter with another lost person. Before it you have His encounter with Nicodemus. And after it, you have His encounter with the Woman at the Well. The passage we just read from John 4 shows us several patterns that we’re going to be looking at over the next several weeks. In it, we see the pattern of evangelism as Jesus reaches out to this pitiful, lost woman. We see the pattern of response as she goes through several stages in reaction to Jesus’ words. And then wedged into the evangelistic encounter, Jesus gives us the pattern of worship. But before we can look at any of these patterns, we need to take a step back and look at the object of evangelism. People are different, aren’t they? I’m different than you are and you are different that somebody else is. Each of us have different personalities, we have different emotions, we have different likes and dislikes. That’s why, before we look at the pattern of evangelism and the pattern of response over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to look at the pattern of people this morning. And the way that God laid out this text through the Apostle John gives us a wonderful example of the pattern of people in Nicodemus and the woman at the well. Now, we’re not going to go back and read about Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus. If you need a refresher, you can go back and look at chapter 3. But what we find there and what we find here in chapter 4 gives us some good insight into the pattern of people.
The first insight into the pattern of people is that people are different. Wow, that was brilliant, wasn’t it? People are different. So, how were Nicodemus and the woman at the well different? Well, the first way is the most obvious. Nicodemus was a man and the woman was a woman. A few years ago, Time Magazine shocked the world when they actually admitted that boys and girls might be born different. Earth shattering, I know. But that was a key difference between Nicodemus and the woman at the well. Especially in those days. Men just didn’t approach women in Jewish culture. It was so extreme that there was a group of Jewish rabbis that were called the bruised and bleeding ones. Do you know why they were bruised and bleeding? Because they held to an extreme teaching that a Jewish rabbi couldn’t even look on a woman who wasn’t his wife or daughter. And even then, he couldn’t look on them when they were outside. So what happened when one of these rabbis was walking down the street and a woman was coming at him from the other direction? He would close his eyes. And when he closed his eyes, he’d run into things. Apparently he did that a lot—that’s why he was bruised and bleeding. I’ve known guys to run into things when a woman passes them on the street, but it’s never from closing their eyes. But even aside from those extremists, regular law-abiding Jewish men never approached women in public. And if a woman approached them, they would never enter into a conversation with them. The differences between men and women weren’t just natural in that society. They were cultural. And they were extreme.
But that wasn’t the only way that Nicodemus and the woman were different. They were socially different. He was a brilliant scholar. He was a Pharisee which meant that he was a supremely dedicated biblical scholar. He knew the Scriptures so well that people would come to him for answers. But he wasn’t just a biblical scholar, he was a ruler of the Jews. That meant that he was also part of the Sanhedrin. And to be part of the Sanhedrin meant that you had to know culture and government and politics. Just by being a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin, we know that Nicodemus had to be a brilliant scholar. He was the upper-crust of society. He could rub elbows with scholars and artists and heads of state. He knew which fork to use for which course at dinner. He was elite. But not the woman. The woman was as common as could be. She didn’t have servants or hired hands. She did the work herself. It wasn’t that she just wasn’t part of the elite class. She didn’t even have a class at all. Notice the time that she came to the well. Verse 6 says that she came about the sixth hour. That was either around noon or around 6, depending on whether John was using Jewish or Roman time. If it was noon, nobody came to draw water in the heat of the day. So she would have been by herself. If it was 6PM, nobody came to draw water that late in the evening—so she would have been by herself. Typically, the ordinary common ladies and the servants of the town would come to draw water from the city well in the morning. They would come as a group. It was a social event. It was kind of like the office water cooler or break room today. It was a place for them to gather and talk about what was going on in life. Or talk about social outcasts. The kinds of social outcasts who would go to the well by themselves about the sixth hour. Nicodemus was a scholar. She was a social outcast. Not that she didn’t deserve it. Because there was another reason Nicodemus and the woman were different.
They were morally different. Nicodemus was by all accounts, a fine, upstanding man. If you ever wanted someone to marry your daughter, he was the one. He was moral, he was just… you could even say he was righteous. As a Pharisee, he believed that the only way he was going to get to heaven was that he had to earn it. He had to completely obey God’s law. And not only did he have to obey God’s law, he had to obey Jewish law. See, the Pharisees were so cautious about breaking God’s law that they built legal fences around it. The law said, you can’t break the Sabbath by working. They were so afraid of doing anything even resembling work on that day that they came up with all kinds of definitions of what work was. The law said you couldn’t harvest on the Sabbath, because harvesting is working. They, in turn, said that if you see a gray hair on you head on the Sabbath, you couldn’t pluck it because that would be harvesting. Then they even took it one step further. They built the fence up a little bit higher. They said you couldn’t even look in a mirror on the Sabbath. Because if you look in a mirror, you might see a gray hair. And if you see that gray hair you might be tempted to pluck it. And if you pluck it, you would be harvesting. And if you harvest on the Sabbath, you are breaking the law. And Pharisees did everything they could to keep from breaking the law. Most of them were hypocrites and did it just for a show. But when Jesus encountered them, He confronted them on it immediately. He didn’t do that with Nicodemus. So I don’t think Nicodemus was that way. I think he was truly a “good” person. But what about the woman? Was she a good person? Certainly not. She was loose. She was wild. She was a tramp—what we might call white trash. She was with a different man every time you turned around. Undoubtedly by her history, she was hard and cold. She was defensive and reserved and sarcastic and deceitful. There were many days of her life where she broke most of the Ten Commandments before breakfast. Certainly before she was able to show her face at the public meeting place to draw water. Those two were about as different as they could be. But there was one more difference. And that was how they came to Jesus.
Do you remember how Nicodemus came to Jesus? We all remember that he came to Jesus by night. We make that a big deal like he was a coward or something. But the fact is that he came to Jesus. He sought Jesus out. He was a seeker of truth, so he went to this One who was doing the things that only God is supposed to make happen. He took the initiative. The woman didn’t. She was just going to the well like she always did. The last thing she wanted was to see somebody there. Especially a man. She had enough trouble with them as it was. She was just minding her own business. Jesus sought her. She was a Samaritan. Jews hated Samaritans. As a matter of fact, when Jews made the trip from Judea to Galilee, the direct route took them through Samaria. But they wouldn’t take the direct route. They would walk all the way around Samaria, just to keep from coming in contact with any Samaritans. But not Jesus. Jesus had an appointment there. And whether the time was noon or six PM, that would not have been the normal time to arrive in Samaria if you left Judea after breakfast. Jesus purposely arranged his travel schedule to arrive at that well at exactly the right time. And He did it for one purpose. He did it to seek out that woman. That woman who had no interest in seeking Him. Nicodemus sought Jesus. Jesus sought the woman. The woman was engulfed in a world of sin. Nicodemus was revered for his righteousness. Nicodemus was one of society’s elite. The woman was the dregs of society’s outcast. They were vastly different. But in so many ways they were the same.
They were both looking for something to fill the void in their lives. With all his knowledge and education, things just didn’t quite make sense to Nicodemus. There was something missing in his worldview. He had a splinter in his mind he just couldn’t get out. With all her sexual adventures and pleasure seeking, the woman was missing something too. She tried to fill it with temporary relationships. She tried to fill the hole in her soul with sex and love and relationships. But it wasn’t working. She was more empty now than ever. And then they met Jesus. Two people so completely different. Two people seemingly on opposite ends of the spectrum. But two people who were lost. Two people who were lost and trying to find their own way. They were both trying to use their own strength and their own means to fill the void in their lives. But they never did. Until they met Jesus. And Jesus told Nicodemus, you’ve depended on your mind and your reasoning and your standing so long that the only solution for you is to start completely over. I’m not going to fix your worldview. You have to be completely born again. He told the woman at the well, you’ve got a thirst in your life that you have been trying your whole life to fill on your own. You’ve gone from relationship to relationship to relationship to try to fill it and all you’re doing is getting drier and drier. I’m not going to patch up your relationships for you. But I will fix your thirst. I will give you living water that will continually fill the void in your life. And not just fill it, but fill it to overflowing. And the promise to both of them was the same. Nicodemus, when you are born again, you will have eternal life. Woman, when you drink of the water that I give you, you will have eternal life.
You see, the pattern of people is just like Nicodemus and the woman at the well. People are different. You might have a lot of money or no money. You might be the smartest person in Bluefield… or you might have to study for days just to pass time. Everybody is different. You might have lived a good life. You might be the nicest person in town. Or you might be ashamed of your life. Or worse yet, you might not be ashamed, but should be. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what your background is. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad you’ve lived your life. No matter who you are. No matter how different you are. you still have the same need. You still need Jesus. You were built to have a relationship with your creator. That relationship has been destroyed and made impossible by your sin. But Jesus died to take that sin from you. And now He wants to give you His righteousness so you can be restored to a right relationship with Him. Whether that looks like new birth to you or like living water to you. Just like everybody else on the face of this earth, you have a void in your life that only Jesus can fill. That is the undeniable pattern of people. Have you allowed Jesus to fill that void? Have you drunk of that living water? Have you been born again?
