Real Refreshment Series

INTRODUCTION

 Have you ever taken the time to sit back and take look at your life? Have you ever taken the time to look back on your life to see where you have been and then tried to look a head to see where you want to be?

 At this point in your life do you know what you want out of life or is life just a blur of busyness?

 What are you looking for out of life? How many of your lives are busy?

 Have you ever been thirsty for something? You were so thirsty for that item that nothing else would satisfy or refresh your thirst.

 Each of us are looking for refreshment in our lives. We are all living busy lives. We start out looking forward to that 16th birthday, and then we look forward to getting out of high school. We continue our search for refreshment by thinking about getting the college degree, then the job and somewhere along the line a spouse, then children, then retirement. We keep thinking that each of the upcoming steps in life will bring satisfaction to us only to find that it does not.

 Today as we continue on our Journey with Jesus, we find ourselves back at the well where Jesus comes across a Samaritan woman.

 Face it. Day to day life can be boring and mundane. It can leave us feeling weary and dreary.

 The woman at the well was looking for refreshment for her life. From what we see in the text, we can assume that this woman needed some refreshment in her life. This woman went to a well to get some water, but what she got was something that would satisfy her thirst for the rest of her life and for all of eternity.

 Today, you too can have real refreshment in life that will satisfy your inner hunger and thirst for eternity.

 Today we are going to look at three steps that will lead us down the path to real refreshment.

SERMON

I. KNOW WHERE TO LOOK 10-11

 This woman that Jesus converses with is looking for refreshment from a well of water. She went looking for something to refresh her physical thirst. Little did she know what she was going to receive from Jesus?

 READ VERSES 7-10-11

 In verse 10 Jesus tells us a little bit about where we can find real refreshment.

 He tells the woman that real refreshment is a gift from God that can be found through Jesus.

 In JOHN 7:37-38 Jesus said, “Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. "He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ’From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’"

 There was a country song that I remember from when I was a kid. It was called something like “Looking For Love”. The song had a line in it that said, “looking for love in all the wrong places looking for love in too many places”.

 In our lives, we tend to look for refreshment or some relief from the mundane activities of life in all the wrong places.

 If we are going to find real refreshment, we need to know where to look for it.

 In today’s world people are looking for relief from the rigors of life. People will look for this relief in the bars, they will look for it in the entertainment arena or they will look outside of their marriages to find relief.

 This poor woman was looking for refreshment all of her life and until this point she did not know where to look.

 As I have dealt with people since I became a Christian, I find that people will look everywhere else but Jesus for real refreshment in life.

 I do not know why this is except that maybe at time Christians do not live their lives in such a way that it reflects any amount of refreshment from the rigors of life.

 Some of this may come from the fact that in many churches, you will have a small number of people doing most of the work. When this happens, church can become a burden instead of a joy.

 Jesus never intended His church to be a drain on His people. If will all pitch in and work according to our areas of giftedness, then the church will grow.

 We will have a sense of refreshment in our lives and because we are serving something other than ourselves, we will be more open to share our faith with other people.