2018.09.21 Hopewell @Home ▫ John 4:1-15

Read John 4:1-15

Questions for Littles: What did Jesus know that the Pharisees had heard (v1)? Where did Jesus leave Judea to go (v3)? Through where does v4 say He needed to go to get there? What city did Jesus come to in v5? Where did Jesus sit in v6? By what? At what time? How did He feel from His journey? Who came to draw water (v7)? What did Jesus ask her? Where had the disciples gone (v8)? What does the Samaritan woman ask Him (v9)? What two things does Jesus say that she doesn’t know in v10? What does He say that she would have done if she did know? From where does the woman point out that Jesus is ill-equipped to draw this living water (v11)? What does she ask Him in v12? What does Jesus point out in v13? But what does He say about the person who drinks the water that He gives them (v14)? What will the water that He gives them become? How does the woman answer in v15? What does she never want to have to do again?

In the Gospel reading this week, Jesus is leaving Judea as the heat gets turned up. But there is something that He has to do.

It wasn’t a logistical necessity. Jews went from Judea to Galilee while going around Samaria, instead of through it, all the time. But our passage uses a little Greek particle that means something was absolutely necessary. This was not a necessity of geography but a necessity of mission, a necessity of purpose.

It’s high noon when an exhausted Jesus sits down by the well. No time to be drawing water—which is perhaps why this woman, who has had four husbands and hasn’t even bothered to marry the fifth man, would come by herself.

But here she meets someone who talks about never being thirsty again. That sounds great. She’d love to never again have to come out to the well to draw water.

But she doesn’t know that the gift of God is everlasting life. And she doesn’t know that the One who asks for a drink is God Himself in the flesh, who has come not to get from her something but to give to her everything.

Many people don’t know this about Christ. They think that He has come to demand one thing or another. Perhaps, more accurately, they know that they will have to give up their entire life to Him if they receive Him.

But they haven’t wrestled with the fact that they deserve Hell. And they haven’t learned that God offers them eternal life as a gift instead. They haven’t reasoned out the fact that Jesus is the living God, and that He has no need of anything from us—so that it is His role to give Himself, and ours to worship Him for it, whether in an hour of set apart worship, or an entire life that is lived as worship.

Have you learned what the gift of God is, and who it is that gives it?

Suggested songs: ARP45A “My Heart Is Greatly Stirred” or TPH351 “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us”