I remember as I was growing up hearing my parents say to me on more than one occaision, "Just wait until you have kids of your own, then you’ll understand." I don’t suppose that any of your parents ever said anything like that to you, but mine said it regularly.
The thing that is so frustrating about that statement is that it turned out to be true. There is something inexplicable about parenthood, something that can never be understood by hearing about it, reading about it, or thinking about it. It has to be experienced. When I stood holding my breath in that delivery room as Alexandra came in to the world, instantly I knew that my life had changed in a way I could not describe. From that point on I was going to be someone’s daddy.
Like parenthood Christianity is something that must be understood primarily by experience. In the passage that we read today there are a group of people who found that out. Earlier in this fourth chapter Jesus had an encounter with a woman at the well. That encounter was to change her life forever. She went back to her town and told everyone who would listen about this man who had known everything about her.
Many of the Samaritans in that town believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony and they sought out Jesus to see and hear Him for themselves.And then at the end of the passage they make a fascinating statement, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world."
This statement embodies the very heart of what I want to talk about today. The Samaritans were not satisfied with a second hand knowledge of Jesus, They wanted to meet Him for themselves--they wanted to experience Him. That experience is what I want to explore with you today.
I believe that experience is at the very heart of the Christian faith. I am willing to proclaim without excuse that I have had a personal, heartfelt experience with Jesus Christ and it is that experience on which the anchor of my Faith holds. I can say with the Samaritans that I no longer believe because of what I’ve been told but because I have experienced Jesus for myself.
Christianity is more than just a statement of faith, more than church membership. It is not merely a philosophical position. It is a faith experience. You can’t buy Christianity, and you don’t inherit it from your parents. It must be experienced!
So what is the Christian experience based upon? What is the nature of this experience And what is its value? I’d like to examine all of those questions using the experience of the Samaritans in John 4:39-42 as a guide. And I’d like to look at it in a novel way--
Begining, Middle, and End...
The Christian Experience Begins By Hearing the Message (v. 39)
Verse 39 of our text says, "Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ’He told me everything I ever did.’"
Hearing about Jesus is an important first step. Without hearing the message we would not know what to believe. The Samaritans were made aware of the presence of Jesus and His power by the testimony of the woman. In the same way today we must become aware of the gospel message in order to know that we must have an experience with Him.
The Apostle Paul made this very point when he wrote to the Romans, "How can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ" (Romans 10:14,17).
Hearing the message is important because it gives objectivity to our faith experience. Experience is a very subjective matter. We need an objective, unchanging standard of truth in which to place our faith. That standard is the Gospel as handed to us by the apostles through the Scriptures. Peter wrote in His second letter "We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16). Peter and the other apostles faithfully recorded the message about Jesus in the Scriptures. It is on this unchanging, inspired record of the Good News about Jesus that we base our faith.
Without this firm foundation of Scripture we would have no way to judge the authenticity of our experience or of anyone elses. Some one could say, "My experience tells me that we should smoke dope and eat pizza for communion," and we would have no standard to judge that against. Experience is essential and is by nature a personal and subjective thing but it is not without boundries--it must be based in the truth of the Scripture.
So the Christian experience begins with hearing the message but it doesn’t stop there. Just hearing the message is not enough, you must believe the message and come to Jesus for yourself. Because...
The Christian Experience Requires a Personal Encounter With Jesus (v. 42a)
In verse 42 the Samaritans say to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves."
Second hand experience is not good enough. For the Samaritans just hearing what the woman said was not good enough. Hearing the message drove them to experience Jesus for themselvesAnd we also must have a personal encounter with Him.
You’ve probably heard it said that God has no grandchildren, and that is an absolutely true statement. We cannot count on our heritage, church affiliation, nationality, or even our own good works to replace a personal experience with Him. The apostle Paul on more than one occasion wrote about His own impeccable heritage, but he said that he counted all of those things as trash compared to his faith experience with Jesus. The righteousness that God requires of us we cannot gain on our own or from our affiliations. We must individually place our trust in what Jesus has done for us. We must meet Him personally.
The experience you have with Jesus is uniquely your own. No two people will have the same experience. Some come to Him with tears, some with laughter, some with great relief, others with solemn awe at the magnificence of it all. But I have never yet met a person who said they didn’t feel something, when they met Jesus.
You may say, "Preacher, our salvation is based on faith not feelings." And I would reply, "you’re absolutely right." The work that Christ did to cleanse us from our sins is a bona fide historical fact. God came to earth in human flesh. They called His Name Jesus. He was nailed to a cross to pay the price for each of our sins and He rose again to prove His victory over death and to offer us the gift of eternal life. That is fact. Our salvation is based upon our faith in that act and not upon our feelings. That means that heartfelt experience at salvation is just extra that God gives us--it isn’t essential to salvation, but He gives it to us anyway.
Now there may be times down the road when you don’t feel that way anymore. That’s when it is comforting to know that our salvation is not based on how we are feeling at the time. But I am a Pentecostal and I’m a big believer in the heartfelt experience of salvation, and I believe there is good reason for it. That reason brings us to our final point--the end or the result of the Christian experience...
The Christian Experience Leads to an Unshakable Faith (v. 42b)
In the second half of verse 42 the Samaritans say to the woman, "now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world." They didn’t just think or feel like He might be the Savior--THEY KNEW because they had experienced Him personally.
Our personal experience with Jesus serves the same function. It is one thing to simply believe the gospel--it is quite another to experience Him and to KNOW that He is your savior. This is a knowledge that can sustain you through the times you don’t have Holy Ghost goose bumps running up and down your spine. God recognized the value of making those mountain top experiences into markers in our lives. Read with me the story of how God directed Joshua to make just such a marker when the Israelites crossed the Jordan into the promised land.
Joshua 4:1-7 When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the LORD said to Joshua, 2 "Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, 3 and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan from right where the priests stood and to carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight." 4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ’What do these stones mean?’ 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever."
In our lives our experiences with Jesus can serve as a pile of stones marking milestones in our Christian experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a salvation experience. I had a pastor who had had a radical salvation experience and a much more mellow experience when he was baptized in the Holy Spirit. His wife was just the opposite, but each of them had an experience to look back upon in which they remembered an almost palpable presence of the Lord.
You may have had a bone jarring Salvation experience or the Lord may have worked a miraculous healing in your life or it may be some other time in your life when you felt the Lord’s presence. Build a pile of stones around that experience. When the trials come--and they will come-- these experiences can serve as markers on which the anchor of your faith can hold. You will be able to say like the Samaritans, "I KNOW that Jesus is the Saviour of the world."
CONCLUSION
So let us not forget that Christianity is not just a philosophy or a creed but it truly is a faith experience with Jesus. That experience begins with and is grounded in the unchanging truth of the Gospel message--That Jesus died for our sins and rose again. The Gospel message draws us to experience Jesus for ourselves--we cannot rely on our heritage or anyone else’s experience, but must have our own unique experience with Jesus. That experience will give you an abiding faith and will serve as a marker for you throughout your journey of Faith. It will be a light in the very darkest of times--a reminder that He knows you by name and that He is with you even when you don’t feel Him.
INVITATION:
Perhaps some of you here today have been listening to me speak, and you realize that you have never had an experience with Jesus. You may have grown up in the church and just never recognized the need for that experience. Maybe all of this is relatively new to you, but you feel within your heart the need to have an experience with Jesus. He’s waiting with open arms today. He died on a cross to pay the price for your sins so that you could have eternal life. All you must do is accept the gift He offers by putting your trust in what He has done for you and turning to follow Him. If you want to experience Him today I’d like you to come forward now. There are people here who would like to show you the way and pray with you.
