"Woman At The Well & Living Waters”

GET READY FOR THE RESET

“Woman at the Well & Living Waters”

John 4:1-30

Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nskXHSfaD54

With the pandemic and its high mortality rate coupled with a worldwide financial crisis and social upheaval, there seems to be an understanding and agreement among world leaders that the world needs a reset.

Now, in our time together leading up to our series on “Resetting Our Lives,” we’re not going to focus on what the world is doing, but what is God doing.

To “reset” means to make an adjustment, that is, to set something to a new setting, or to set it back to its initial state. And so, while the reset that has been dominating our airwaves has centered on what’s going on around us, the reset that God desires is about what lies within us.

Now, in these series of messages leading up to our special series in November, on getting ourselves reset, reignited, and refueled, I want to look at those that Jesus encountered, their stories, and what happened that saw their lives reset back to God. And that’s because there is no resetting our lives until we have that same type of encounter with Jesus.

The story of the woman at the well is one of the better-known Bible stories, especially when we’re talking about getting our lives reset to God.

On the surface, it deals with ethnic prejudice between the Jews and Gentiles. And while this is true in the most general of terms, it doesn’t take away from the obvious gender prejudice that existed during that time.

And what I find disturbing is how little we’ve moved away from these prejudices today, which shouldn’t be the case, because by His actions in going to Samaria and meeting with this woman, Jesus was saying that such prejudices have nothing to do with God’s kingdom here on earth.

In fact, we see this very thing in what God has called for the church to be. In Galatians 3:28 it says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28 NKJV)

And so, through Jesus, God did away with such distinctions, and the church, therefore, is to be a place where people of every age, gender, sizes and shapes, from different races and ethnicities, of various personalities and social backgrounds, are all accepted and welcomed despite their various flaws and shortcomings, and that’s because who is in the church already, and that is all of us with all of our personal hang-ups and problems.

The one and only problem that I see to this conclusion is the human tendency, our tendency, to judge others based upon our preconceived and preconditioned stereotypes, customs, and prejudices.

And so, as we look at this story we see is Jesus treating this woman as a person in need of a reset and bringing about that reset with love and compassion.

Now, the story begins with it saying that Jesus, “must,” and “needed” to go through Samaria (John 4:4).

For the Jews, this was unheard of. If they are going from Jerusalem to the Galilee, and vice versa, they would take the longer road through the area known as Perea, on the Eastern side of the Jordan River. Never would they go through Samaria, even though it is the shorter route because for the Jews, Samaritans were unclean, and they would have nothing to do with them.

Samaritans were--a mixed-race people, who had intermarried with the Assyrians centuries before when Assyria conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel. They were hated by the Jews because of this cultural mixing and because they had their own version of the Bible, that is, they only had the first five books of Moses, along with their own temple on Mount Gerizim, although by this time, the temple had been destroyed.

It would seem that Jesus’s visit didn’t sit well with the Jewish religious leaders. They even accused Jesus of being a Samaritan, (John 8:48). But Jesus’s mission was for the Kingdom of God, and as we see through His actions and words, God’s kingdom is open to all. In fact, Jesus spoke well of the Samaritans, which is seen in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

It was because of this that many say the reason Jesus had to go is because He had to deal with the issue of prejudice, along with racial and gender stereotyping as we just discussed. And while this is of extreme importance, I see it as something else, and that is that Jesus had an appointment to keep.

Even Jesus said a little later that He couldn’t do anything that He didn’t hear His Father say, or saw His Father doing (John 5:19; 12:49). And so, an appointment was made with this Samaritan woman, and Jesus was on His way to keep it for the reset of her life.