A few weeks ago, Margaret was stood up here preaching a sermon based on the second beatitude. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled.” In our reading today, we heard Jesus stating exactly how that filling takes place. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Aren’t those wonderful words ‘ a spring of water welling up to eternal life’?
Unfortunately, if you are like me, there are many times in your life when that spring of water does not seem to well up very much. There are times when it hardly seems to trickle, and occasionally you may even find it hard to see a few drops of this life giving water. What happens when things get like this? It wasn’t always this way in our lives. I became a Christian when I was sixteen, and I can still remember what it felt like at that time to have that spring of living water running through me. You could not stop me worshipping God, witnessing to others and everything else. But slowly things changed, and the water slowed down. It has always been there, but it has not always been so noticeable in my life.
When you read this story of the woman at the well, you will find spiritual movement in three different directions. The first movement begins with this water inside of us, the second moves towards God. Some people say that this woman was trying to put Jesus off when she started talking about worship. She was getting uncomfortable with the things Jesus was telling her, and so brought up this great disagreement that Jews and Samaritans had been having for years about worship. I am not sure, however, that this is the right way to interpret this story. It makes a lot more sense to me to think of this as a natural progression rather than an attempt to change the subject. Jesus has just said how accepting Him as Lord can make an incredible difference to this woman’s life, and what is more natural after that than going on to talk about worship. Think back to the time when you accepted Jesus as Lord, was it possible for you not to worship God as soon as you had done that? If this were possible, I would question whether you have truly accepted His Lordship over your life.
The final movement is seen when the disciples return with the food they have bought. We read in John 4:28: “ Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?" and then in verse 39: “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, "He told me everything I ever did." So the third movement goes out to others, we become witnesses to Christ.
First – inwards with that spring of water, then upwards with worship to God, and finally outwards as we witness to others; these three movements should describe our Christian lives; there is nothing else that needs to happen.
But many times, as I have said, it is not like this; we start in this way but often find it hard to continue like this. Where do we look for help if this has happened in our lives? I have mentioned about the three movements involved in the Christian life, is it something we are doing wrong in the way we witness? Could it be the upward movement that has gone wrong, is it our worship of God that causes us to lose this Christian life we experienced when we first believed? Or is it something else?
Just imagine for a moment that it is spring again. You have bought a pack of flower seeds to sow in your garden. The pack states clearly “fifty seeds”, so you sow these fifty seeds and what happens – you get maybe twenty or thirty flowers growing from them. What has happened to the other twenty or thirty seeds? Why didn’t they grow, as they should have done? Was it something in the earth that stopped them, of course it wasn’t, for enough seeds did grow to show that was not the case. The answer can only be that there was some problem inside the seeds themselves that prevented their growth.
If we are in this position of having lost something of that first love that we had for Christ, if we no longer worship and witness as we used to, the problem is not usually with our worship and our witness for these are the outer movements similar to when that seedling breaks through the soil. The problem starts inside us within that place where the spring of water has its source.
One of the greatest reasons for this problems growth is that we fail to visit this spring that Christ has placed within us. I grew up in the Methodist Church where the four weeks before Christmas, and the four weeks before Easter were designed as times of introspection. Times when you would look at how your own personal Christian life was doing. I believe that it is actually a loss to us all that these times of advent and lent that used to be used for this purpose are disappearing. Calvin Miller gives one reason for this slow disappearance in his book ‘The Table of Inwardness’: “In the privacy of our inmost hearts, Christ prepares a table where he can meet with us alone. Here he waits to enjoy intimate friendship with us and to nurture his life within us. But the journey inward can be painful: we fear exposure and are afraid of discovering how superficial we really are. Instead, we concentrate on satisfying our more insistent appetites – for status, wealth, sexual and social fulfilment – and we are distracted from making the journey.”
It is quite possible that many of the social problems in our country today are related to this fear of looking inwards at our lives. One of the reasons why people get married so quickly is because they are scared of being alone. And often those marriages fail because the people in them did not take the time to discover all about their partner, they had not even taken time to discover more about themselves. I was telling Mona a while ago that it may be a good idea if marriages could not happen until the people getting married had spent at least a year on their own first. That way they discover that they are not getting married because they need someone, but are getting married because they want and love someone. The reason why our pubs are so busy, even in areas of high unemployment is not so much because people need alcohol, but because they fear to stay inside on their own and so they go to the pubs and drink.
It hasn’t always been like this, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the young prince stands before his mother and tells her “Come, come and sit you down, you shall not budge! You go not till I set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you.” Nowadays, the words ‘set you up a glass’ have a different meaning and the result of the glass prevents the refreshing of the parts that certain lager adverts suggest is possible. But in Shakespeare’s time, this introspection used to be more common. Most of the greatest books on spirituality, which is simply another word for this looking inwards, were written at least 200 years ago. These include the works of Brother Lawrence, Madame Guyon, and Saint Teresa’s ‘Interior Castle’.
I would love to be able to stand up here and tell you all that you will find nothing to worry you, or nothing to be ashamed about as you begin this journey inwards to visit this spring of water. I cannot do this however, and if I did, I hope you would have the sense to ensure I did not stand up here again. But alongside these things you may find, there is something so wonderful and so amazing that you will almost forget about these other things, and as you visit this spring more often, you will find that the things that worry us, the things we are ashamed of will slowly disappear from our lives. This spring of water takes over from them.
Many of us have been brought up to believe that there is nothing but sin in the human body, I think I mentioned last time I was preaching how we think ‘I will always sin because that is the way I am.’ But the Bible does not begin by saying that humans are sinful. It begins with God’s words at creation saying ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good’. Sin has hidden a lot of that goodness, pushed it deep within us, but it has not destroyed it. Every person born on this earth has that God place deep inside of him or her; all it needs is this spring of water to fill it up.
Louis Evely, in his book ‘That Man is You’ wrote this poem:
“In the most heartless miser,
deep within the prostitute and the filthiest drunkard,
there is an immortal soul,
which is holily busy breathing
and which,
barred from daylight,
makes nocturnal adoration.”
If you are not sure how true these words are, just look again at our reading today where at a well in Sychar, Jesus meets one of those loose women, she may not have been a prostitute but her morals were certainly not of the highest standard. By the gift of His water, Jesus freed that soul from captivity and allows it to see the daylight.
I quoted earlier from one of the books that I find most helpful on this subject, it is Calvin Miller’s ‘The Table of Inwardness’. He gives a picture of what he calls a table of communion. It has two chairs with it, the first is occupied by Jesus; the other is where we can sit. This private place is available to all who are Christians. What happens at this table? Almost anything, it can be a place where no words are spoken but silence and companionship are enjoyed to the utmost. It can be a place where we hear Jesus speaking to us, and where we can speak with Him. It can be a place where we receive all that we need, yet it is also a place where we can give all that we have. How do we find this place? Go somewhere quiet, forget about all that your mind says you should be doing, and look and move inwards, maybe with the help of a few scripture verses or a simple prayer like the Jesus prayer – Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And with this, we move into God’s presence. How long does this take? The answer again is impossible to give. At first, it is a good idea to limit this time to five minutes or so, as you gain more experienced at spending time sat at this table with Jesus, or sat by this wonderful spring of water he has placed within you it is possible to stay for longer and longer periods.
Jesus told this woman at the well that “the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” But that spring of water is not going to help a lot if you do not visit it regularly and allow it slowly to take over your life.
I read a fictional book recently about the building of the Hoover dam and the electricity companies that were formed because of this project. This book reckoned that when the dam was being built, the Colorado River was moved so that the turbine generators could be built. I don’t know whether the story is true, and I cannot remember the name of the book now either. But I do know that it is possible to re-channel rivers, it has been done many times. It is here that we find another reason why we can lose touch with this spring of water that Christ places within us.
We try to channel this spring of water into ways that suit our lives and us. I am sure you have heard of people being called Sunday Christians; well this is what they do. Generally, they have made as sincere a commitment to Christ as all other Christians have. But they go on to channel their Christianity to a Sunday in Church. All other areas of their lives remain the same.
I am sure that this must be one of the things that grieves God most about His people. He has given his life so that this spring of water can be in each one of us, can well up out of us changing both us, and the worlds we live in. And what do we do, we say thank you God for this gift, I will let it out occasionally when I choose to. It says much for God’s love and mercy that He allows us to do this, but how He must long for the day when we come to this life giving spring and release it to flow through all of our lives turning us into the image of His Son.
It has to be said that the Church itself is or at least it has been one of the most effective organisations for channelling these springs of water. This is one reason why we have so many denominations today. The Anglican Church tried to channel the water that was flowing through John and Charles Wesley, they tried to tell them “God only works this way”. The Wesley’s did not listen and Methodism was born. In the last twenty years, the established Churches have tried to do the same, they have been telling people “God only works this way, through these channels”, again, people did not listen and we have seen the growth of house Churches, and the way more and more people have been brought to God through them. I am certain that there will come a time when these Churches say to people “God will only do this”, and something else will start.
It is time that we learnt that we cannot control these springs of water successfully, in our lives, or in our Churches. When we try, we suffer for doing so.
Inwards, upwards and outwards, those are the three movements we see in the time Jesus spends with this woman at the well. The upwards movement, worship to God, evolves from the inward. As we spend more time with Christ at this spring, we discover more reason to worship Him. The outward evolves from both of these, the more time we spend with Christ, the more we become like Him. And as we become more like Him, people are attracted to Him through what they see in us. These are the essential movements of the Christian life that we see in this passage in the Bible. And it all starts with that inner spring of water. “The water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life”. God give us the desire to spend time by this spring, so that we may see it flow ever stronger through our lives. Amen.
