The Discipline of Worship: Experiencing and Expressing Our Satisfaction in God
Download MP3Tonight's passage is from John 46 to 26. I'm gonna start reading, in verse 1. Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples, he left Judea and departed again for Galilee, and he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the field that Jacob had given to his son, Joseph. Jacob's well was there.
Speaker 1:So Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the 6th hour. There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, give me a drink, for his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?
Speaker 1:For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. The woman said to him, sir, you have nothing to draw well water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob?
Speaker 1:He gave us the well and drank from it himself as did his sons and his livestock. Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The woman said to him, sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water. Jesus said to her, go call your husband and come here.
Speaker 1:The woman answered him, I have no husband. Jesus said to him her, you are right in saying you I have no husband, for you have had 5 husbands and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true. The woman said to him, sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.
Speaker 1:Jesus said to her, woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the father. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth, for the father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
Speaker 1:The woman said to him, I know that I know that messiah is coming, he who is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things. Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am he. This is the word of the Lord.
Speaker 2:Alright. Last week, Jeff preached to us about the spiritual discipline of simplicity. And this week, I'm picking up where he left off As we simplify our lives from trifles and worries, we're free to worship God more completely. So pray with me as we start out and we can jump into this text. God, you see and you know our hearts and You know that mine is nervous.
Speaker 2:I don't know what I'm doing. And, it's a heavy thing to open Your word and to proclaim it. God, I pray that you would fill me with the joy of your scriptures, the joy that comes by your spirit, the joy that comes from knowing you, that I would be faithful to proclaim all that this word says and say nothing that it doesn't. And, Lord, that where I fail that your your spirit would speak clearly in spite of me. God, we come to know you and to worship you.
Speaker 2:We come to receive from You everything that You would give to us. And we ask that You do. If You do not come and do not speak, we will go away empty. Lord, bless our time together, and we're thankful for it. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Speaker 2:Alright. Try this thought on for size. One of God's primary purposes in creation and salvation, one of the reasons that he made the world is so that you would experience unspeakable joy, that you would know happiness to a depth that you can't possibly imagine, that you would be satisfied and have peace in a way that, cannot ever be had in this life apart from him. It might be an odd place to start talking about your own satisfaction in worship. That might be different from what we normally expect when we think about coming and singing.
Speaker 2:But, as I've dug into this text this week, show it to you. Check out the unblushing promises of these scriptures. We'll start in Psalm 1611. It says, you made known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy, and at your right hand, pleasures forevermore.
Speaker 2:Again, in Psalm 32, Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous. Shout for joy, all you upright in heart. In Philippians, again, we're commanded to be joyful. It says, rejoice in the lord always, and again I say, rejoice. In Psalm 63, Oh God, you are my God.
Speaker 2:Earnestly, I seek you. My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. My soul will be satisfied as with fat rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips. Psalm 37. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Speaker 2:And Psalm 34, oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. All of these scriptures, combine the idea of us worshiping the Lord, and yet receiving from him this incredible joy. And I think that those two things are in they're actually one thing, that as we worship, that we will be filled with joy. And I come tonight to proclaim that joy to you, and to commend it, and to see if we can't work out some practical ways of seeking it in the disciplines of our life. So let's come up with a working definition of worship that will guide us as we go through, and you can see if this bears you out as we go through the rest of tonight.
Speaker 2:True worship is experiencing and expressing our satisfaction in God, who he is and what he does. Worship is best understood as a verb. It's something that you do. It's not a noun, something that just is. It's active and it's transitive.
Speaker 2:You worship God, you worship some of us worship other things. I know I sometimes do. Worship is always directed towards something, and it's always active. When you worship, you are directing your heart and your mind and your body and your emotions towards the Lord. And so think about that.
Speaker 2:If if worship is about your satisfaction in God, if it's about you being satisfied with who He is and what He does, and if God desires your worship, and if in worshiping God, you receive immense joy, then it's God's desire when he seeks worship from you to him to give back to you immeasurable amounts of joy. And that's gonna run through, all of our themes tonight as we get as we move through this message. So I'm not talking about some timid doctrine. Worship is a pretty serious thing. It's one of the main themes of the bible.
Speaker 2:I'd say it's up there in the top three, perhaps. But we run into a problem pretty quickly because for something that's so important, especially in the New Testament, it's not talked about all that much. Though if you do a little control f in an electronic bible and search for worship in the New Testament, not that I would have done that in preparing for this message, You might not like the results that you get. We don't have to delve into the languages, but there's one word that's the most common word that's used for worship in the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, it appears a 171 times that most common word does.
Speaker 2:But it's far less prevalent than New. It appears 26 times in the gospels and 21 more in Revelation. But in almost every instance, it refers there to the worship of Jesus and His physical presence. So it's people that are worshiping Jesus at His feet or by His side, which we unfortunately lack the luxury of right now. Paul uses this word for worship one time.
Speaker 2:Peter, John, James don't use it at all. It shows up twice in Hebrews, but both times is quoted in the Old Testament. And the four times that it appears in the gospel, or none of the four times that it appears in the gospel of Acts does it refer to Christian worship. It's pagan worshiper. Some just general worship, it isn't Christian worship.
Speaker 2:So there's this bizarre kind of lack of teaching in the New Testament about worship. And I think that's on purpose. I think that God doesn't tell us a whole lot about how we're supposed to worship. Because He wants us to worship Him out of our lives, out of our culture. The worship of God is not, a Jewish tradition.
Speaker 2:It's not a Greek teaching. It's not an American idea. You can worship God in whatever language it is that you speak, in whatever culture you come out of. He's not asking you to, change over to some other culture. He came to save your culture.
Speaker 2:The gospel that we have is a universal gospel, and there's not a whole lot of teaching about the style of worship. So one quick point of application here. It's very difficult to tell another Christian that they're worshiping God wrong. There's not a whole lot of biblical basis for that. And if you find yourself being critical, not that I've ever been critical of another believer, but if you find yourself being critical, as some hypothetical person might, then, I want to check yourself.
Speaker 2:Very seldom do we have grounds for judgment. There's a lot of liberty in our style of worship. Alright. So, with that digression aside, we'll get back on track. There's not a ton of ex of expressed teaching in the New Testament about worship, but John 4 is one great example.
Speaker 2:We're gonna look at John 4, 3 different ways. First, I wanna try to walk through this story from the perspective of the Samaritan woman, and then we're gonna stop, we're gonna look at Christ's teaching on worship and try to pull out some doctrine. And then we're gonna go back and look at it again as best we can through the eyes of Christ so we can figure out what it is that he was thinking and feeling as these things were heard. This is a familiar story. I'm sure everyone knows about the woman at the well.
Speaker 2:It's full of irony and humor, and there's a lot of rich, so many rich truths that are here. We don't have time to hit all of them. We gotta move kind of quickly. This is this is my first sermon. I've never preached before, and I'm I'm an amateur, and I'm kinda like a school kid, like, when you used to write book reports in elementary school, I'm sure you'd take like a novel and you would reduce it down to a 2 page book report.
Speaker 2:And by the time you finish college, you can barely take 2 lines of a poem and fit your explanation to 20 pages. If I were a better preacher, I would know to not try to tackle so much, but if I were a better preacher, then I wouldn't be me, and so, we just have to deal with the cards we're dealt. But let's, let's launch into this text. Let's try to look at this story from the woman's perspective and see what if we can get into why she reacted the way she did and and what life was like for her. The scene is set.
Speaker 2:Jesus is thirsty. He's at a well. It's about noon, it's the middle of the day. He's a Jew. Samaritan woman walks up.
Speaker 2:Jesus says, Give me a drink. Now, it's hard for us to appreciate exactly how awkward this conversation is. The whole Jewish and Samaritan thing is pretty obvious, and that's, you know, it's racial tension and that's very real. There's a lot more than that going on here that maybe is lost on us who don't spend much time drawing water from wells in the Middle East. This woman came to the well by herself in the heat of the day, and that's unusual.
Speaker 2:Normally, if you have to lug a lot of water a long distance, you want to do it when it's cool outside. But it was hot, and here she is at the well in the middle of the day. Now, I think the reason she came at this time is because she didn't want to encounter anybody there. She had no interest in being around anybody else when she came to draw water because she's a kind of social outcast. Several commentaries would pick up on the fact this woman came by herself to draw water and didn't come in groups where it was very common for women in this day, they'd be the ones that would go get water and they would come in a group, not her.
Speaker 2:So she is either not welcome in the company of other people or she's trying to avoid the company of other people. She's kinda singling herself out and isolating herself from community. So we have the racial tension going on. We got some social tension from this woman being an outcast. And then we have there's no way to get around it, there's sexual tension that's here.
Speaker 2:We might not realize that that, you know, drawing water from a well is kind of a big deal back then, but if you can remember back to the book of Genesis, when Isaac met Rebecca, he met her at a well. When Jacob met Rachel, met her at the well, and, oh, by the way, this is Jacob's well. It's not the, it might not be the same well that Jacob was drawing water from then, but, you know, twice we've been told this is Jacob's well. He's kind of emphasizing that connection back to the Old Testament. So you got, you know, I don't know, roll with me here.
Speaker 2:The idiom might not translate to our culture, but there is it's very important, I just want to kind of tuck that away for a little bit, that there's a there's a romantic tension here that is very intentional. So we have these three threads. We have the racial tension, we have the social tension, we have the sexual tension. It just makes this conversation awkward. And Jesus just, like he does, very directly says, give me a drink.
Speaker 2:And she tries to acknowledge the awkwardness and back out a little bit. She's like, Hey, I'm Samaritan. You're a Jew. We don't deal with each other. Leave me alone, basically.
Speaker 2:Let's let's just let this be over with. It's awkward. We'll be done. And Jesus says back to her something that just doubles down on the awkwardness completely. He says, you know, if you knew the gift of God, if you knew who I am, then you'd be asking me for a drink, not the other way around.
Speaker 2:Which I I'm trying to imagine what she would've felt like. I mean, imagine if like some guy in the street walks up to you and says, Hey, give me a dollar. And you say, No. And he goes, Well, if you knew who I am, you'd be asking me for money. I I just don't know how that interaction would What do you mean?
Speaker 2:You'd be, like, It's awkward. I don't want to know what to do with it. He's going back and he tends to engage with her, but we'll see, she keeps kind of pulling herself off. So so Jesus gets, gets he engages as he says something, even something awkward, and then she tries to blow him off even harder. She's like, Hey, you know, dude, this is a well.
Speaker 2:It's pretty deep, and you don't have a bucket. So how are you gonna get water out of here? And anyway, like, are you greater than than Jacob? And Jacob's kind of a big deal, and you're some guy at a well. Everything she's saying is being dismissive of him, kind of pushing him to the side.
Speaker 2:And then finally, Jesus responds to her again and she she opens up to him a little bit. She starts to I'm gonna read exactly what he says, but this actually gets a reaction out of her, something other than just leave me alone. Jesus said, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I give will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life. She's not so much interested as in eternal life.
Speaker 2:She's kind of just looking to be done with the well. She does not want to have to keep coming back here in the heat of the day. It's probably a source of embarrassment for her. It's a drag to carry a bucket of water a long distance when it's hot outside, and she's just trying to be done with it. And so she, even though Jesus has no bucket, she still says, Sarah, give me this water.
Speaker 2:And Jesus then says, Go get your husband. And at this point, the interaction changes completely. The woman goes back to blowing Jesus off again. She's like, I don't have a husband. She's kinda dodging the question.
Speaker 2:She's deflecting. And then Jesus says, Ah, you're right, you don't have a husband. You have you've had 5 husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. He's playing on the Greek words there. There's only one word for man.
Speaker 2:It means man and husband in Greek and, anytime people write in Greek, they just can't help but play on the words. Like, anytime you see man, it could mean husband. Anytime you see husband, it could be man. And so there's a lot, it's just kind of thick with ironies. He's going back and forth and playing on those words.
Speaker 2:But he's calling the woman out for her sin. And that here, I think we kind of move into our second part of the message, which is looking at the doctrine of worship through this very unique interaction. Kinda got the woman's situation figured out, and where she is, and now Jesus really starts to teach us about the nature of worship. Because the woman's busted. I mean, Jesus calls out her sin right there, and she she doesn't try to deny it.
Speaker 2:And she instantly recognizes to her credit that this is a a spiritual interaction she's entered into. This is no longer just about water from a well. She immediately says, oh, sorry. I perceive that you're a prophet. Instead of saying something like, have you been following me around?
Speaker 2:How do you know all this stuff? You know, she does not seem to have any question about how Jesus would have known. She instantly goes to a spiritual place. But then, true to form, she goes back and starts dodging again. She says, instead of repenting or confessing, she says, as a question about the, you know, the theology of worship and geography.
Speaker 2:Well, I like to worship on this mountain, but you say we should worship in Jerusalem. Which is it? That's the implied question. Who's right, or what should I do? She gets wrapped up in the geography and technicalities of worship.
Speaker 2:And if I were Jesus, I would've said, oh, that's completely irrelevant. No, I'm here to talk about you, and talk about your sin, and why you've been doing all these things wrong. It's another, you know, reason number 500 why it's good I'm not Jesus. Because I I would've thought she was trying to change the subject. But worship is exactly what Jesus wants to talk about.
Speaker 2:He is coming to this well to meet this woman. He's coming to engage with her. And he wants to talk about what she wants to talk about. And he has a message for her, even a message of salvation, that's wrapped up in, totally changing all existing paradigms of worship. He says to her, I'm gonna read from verse 21.
Speaker 2:Woman, believe me. The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the father. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth.
Speaker 2:For the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. The first thing that Jesus does is he says that worship isn't about place anymore. As of now, the hour has come. It's not about the mountain anymore.
Speaker 2:Thanks for that. The hour has come where, this isn't about which mountain you're worshiping on anymore. I was talking with Jeff just before I got up here, and Jeff says, this may be the first example in all of history where we have worship without a temple. Jesus himself being the temple, showing up and he's saying, we can just worship out in the world. We don't have to go somewhere.
Speaker 2:There's no central place around which worship will center. And no longer is worship going to be acceptable as me as a mere outward form. Jesus is making this an inward form. He is now saying worship is something that comes out of your heart, not something that just comes out of your hands. It's not just something that you do.
Speaker 2:That that's really the main point of my message. I'm gonna hit it again. The worship that God seeks comes out of the heart, and God is relatively indifferent to the form that it takes. Jesus' point here is actually anticipated several times in the Old Testament. There are several examples of God rejecting the worship of his people when they only worship with outward signs and not with, when their hearts are far from him.
Speaker 2:We'll, take a look at 3 examples. In Isaiah 1, God says this about ritual worship of his people when they do evil in his sight. This is pretty strong language. God says, my soul hates your sacrifices. They've become a burden to me, and I'm weary of bearing them.
Speaker 2:When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen, for your hands are full of blood. Again, in Isaiah 29, God offers no comfort to those who draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men. Jesus actually quotes Isaiah 29, these verses we read to the Pharisees, I think in Mark 7 and Matthew 13. Another condemnation comes out of Malachi.
Speaker 2:It's perhaps the strongest of the 3. The priests had been offering sick and blemish sacrifices and saving the best, maybe for the governors, maybe for themselves. It's not clear, but they've been giving God, kind of worthless sacrifices that weren't very good. And God says, oh, that there were 1 among you who would shut the doors, that you might not kindle fire on my altar in vain. I have no pleasure in you, declares the lord of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hand.
Speaker 2:For from the rising of the sun to its setting, my name will be great among the nations, and in every place, incense will be offered to my name in a pure offering. Oh, that one would shut the doors, that you would not kindle fire on my altar in vain. Incredibly strong rejection by God of worship that's just outward, that's just an act that we perform. God takes no pleasure in just killing an animal inside of a building. That's not what He's after.
Speaker 2:He's not particularly impressed, if we can hit closer to home. He's not particularly impressed with the quality of our music or the posture of our bodies. The worship that he seeks is different. It has to come from the heart. Or as Jesus puts it, the true worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.
Speaker 2:I'm not exactly sure what it means to worship in spirit and in truth. So, I'm sorry if you're disappointed. Well, and commentators seem to wrestle about that. They don't really know what exactly this means. I got as many different definitions as I read sermons and commentaries about it.
Speaker 2:So I don't know what to say fully. I will say only what I think I can say. That's what Jesus says about it. He says that God's a spirit, and so we must worship God in spirit and in truth. And when I started to prepare the message, I thought that spirit and truth were gonna be kind of opposites.
Speaker 2:That worshiping in in the spirit was like worshiping with joy and passion and power, and worshiping in truth was remembering that our worship should always be grounded in the truths of scripture and that we shouldn't give ourselves away into, like, emotionalism and hocus pocus. And that's true. We should we should do both of those things. We should have joyful experiential worship. We should be grounded in the truth of scripture.
Speaker 2:But I don't think that's what Jesus is talking about here. I don't think spirit and truth are opposites in any way. I think that the word truth amplifies the word spirit. I think that the his purpose there is to say that we must worship God truly as he is, which is a spirit. If we want to worship the real God, we must worship him as he is, as a spirit, and out of our spirit.
Speaker 2:True worship must reflect who God is. And now that's that's wide open. I mean, think about back to the old testament. We we studied Exodus last year, I guess, and we were we talked about the the construction of the tabernacle and what the Jews had to do to lug the tabernacle around the desert. And there's materials listed there.
Speaker 2:I mean, you could almost, you know, tab a goes to tab b, and you could put together a tabernacle straight out of Exodus. And they had to carry this thing around and adhere strictly to all the rules. But now we're talking about God's a spirit, you worship God as a spirit. This means that no longer are you bound by geography, no longer are you bound by having to build a tabernacle, no longer are you bound by any kind of geography. But it also places a lot more responsibility on us because God is saying we must worship him in spirit and in truth.
Speaker 2:And to kind of illustrate this point, let's go back to Isaiah 1 for a second. Remember God has just said, your your hands are full of blood, and I'm I'm not gonna listen to your prayers. I'll hide my eyes from you. Right after that, he's he describes the kind of worship that he wants. And it's in very simple terms, and they're very universal.
Speaker 2:He says, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, and defend the widow's cause. Let me go now to another text, another familiar text in Micah 6. I think it it picks up on these same points. I wasn't supposed to lose my place like this. I want you to notice something as we get in this passage.
Speaker 2:Micah starts out talking about various outward forms of expression that his worship of the Lord can take. And they begin to get bigger and bigger, and more and more outrageous, and they actually end up in a pretty bad place. So I will start in verse 6. With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? In other words, how am I gonna worship God?
Speaker 2:Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with 10 1,000 rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul. If we wrap ourselves up in the outward expression of our worship, this text from Micah suggests that ends badly. We can never outwardly express anything that pleases God in our worship.
Speaker 2:It cannot come from the outside. It's not the magnitude of our expression, the work of our hands, or the sacrifice of our firstborn that will satisfy God. And if we go down that path, if we try to earn God's attention, it ends it ends in evil. But what does Micah say that God requires? He says, he has told you, oh man, what is good.
Speaker 2:This is from verse 8. And what does the Lord require of you You see how deep this has to apply in our lives? I mean, if if Micah's You see how deep this has to apply in our lives? I mean, if if Mike is talking about worship, this is this is universal. We can't pretend that God only wants us to go through the motions of worship in a gym on Sundays.
Speaker 2:He hasn't given us 5 steps to effective worship. Instead, he's told us that every turn that we take, every action, must be an act of worship. Every time that we have a chance to do good, that's a choice to worship the Lord or not. Check out these words from Colossians 3. Whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus giving thanks to the God, to God the Father through him.
Speaker 2:And, and, and, and, and, and, and, whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord. Make every action an act of worship. Or again, in Romans 12, at the end of Paul's long argument, when he's laid out God's plan of salvation for all the nations, he ends that argument and says begins Romans 12 by saying, I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. For this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.
Speaker 2:So instead of offering dead, outward, external sacrifices, Paul says, no. Now you have to be the sacrifice yourself. The implication of God's grace to you, the necessary requirement of that, is that your whole life becomes a sacrifice. It's no longer something that you have and you took a put on an altar, but it becomes all consuming. It's what you do.
Speaker 2:It's who you are. That's the main point of the spiritual discipline of worship. We're to strive to worship God in everything that we do. It's not just an activity we can restrict to a time or a place. We have the opportunity to experience and to express our satisfaction in God, in literally every act that we take, every single day.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of the doctrine that we've got here. Worship now has to be literally everything that we do. It must become the lens through which we view every action that we take. And that we can achieve and obtain that discipline more and more by thinking about what God wants, what pleases God, what expresses our satisfaction in God, in all of our actions. So that that's all.
Speaker 2:I could just wrap up now, and that's the application. But I think if we want to see this truth most fully, we have to look back to to at at the story in John 4 from Jesus' perspective. I'm a little quick because I'm kind of going slow. We already saw that the woman at the well, responded to an awkward situation by trying to disengage with Jesus, but Jesus, at every point, is engaging with her. He asks for a drink to start the conversation, and when and when she blows him off, he begins to share with her about eternal life.
Speaker 2:He begins to say, Look, woman, I can offer you something that will last forever. I mean, I know that you're a sinner. I know that you're far from me, but I've come to find you. And when in the light of his seeking after her, imagine how poignant it was when she says to him, sir, you have nothing to draw the water, and the well is deep. Are you greater than our father, Jacob?
Speaker 2:Because the water that Jesus is offering doesn't come out of the ground. It's it's not a bucket that will draw up the living water of the Holy Spirit. But rather, it will be taken from Jesus' veins, right? I mean, He's He must suffer that we will have this. And she easily could've said, You're right, there's no bucket.
Speaker 2:There's no bucket that can go deep enough. You can't drill down to get what you want. This wouldn't what he offers would cost him everything. So when she says, he comes to seek her, she's rejecting him. She says, Sir, you can't get this water.
Speaker 2:You can't do it. He says, Oh, but I can and I will. He tells her that if she drinks the water that he offers, she will never thirst again. And that this water that his spirit, which I think is what he's talking about, that his spirit will become a well of living water, always satisfying every need. She asked for it.
Speaker 2:She says, give me this water. And then Jesus's response is very interesting because it fits into 1 of 3 categories. She says, sir, give me the water. And he says, go get your husband. Is that his way of saying, no, you can't have the water?
Speaker 2:Is that him saying, I'll give you the water, but maybe later? Or is that him saying, Yes, I'll give it to you? How did he respond to her? It's very easy to say, Oh, he blew her off again. He did to her what she had been doing to him.
Speaker 2:But I think that what Jesus was saying to her is, you can have the water, and this is where it starts. I I don't think He was trying to change the subject at all. I think He was offering her living water, even eternal life, by telling her to go get her husband, even though He knew that she didn't have one. He knew her sin and He knew that every that part of her obtaining eternal joy in him meant that she had to be freed from the sin that she lived in. Listen to these words from Isaiah 55.
Speaker 2:Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. He who has no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
Speaker 2:Incline your ear and come to me. Hear that your soul may live, and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. Jesus confronts the woman with her sin. He he launches into this discussion about her husband's so that he can show her the folly of sin. He holds up himself next to the lie that she's been living in to show her that his joy is the only one.
Speaker 2:Stop there real quick. The, you know, the Hebrew, when you wanna say something, and emphasize it, you just say it twice. Here, Jeremiah says it 3 times. Be appalled, oh heavens, at this. Be shocked.
Speaker 2:Be utterly desolate. This is like triple exclamation points. Whatever this is is a big deal. Be utterly desolate, declares the Lord. For my people have committed 2 evils.
Speaker 2:They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have hewed out for themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water. God calls it a great evil that we, His people, have denied ourselves the joy that He offers us. And we have tried to capture joy in the futility of sin. He considers that it's not a tragedy. That's not, Oh, you y'all are missing out.
Speaker 2:That's a big enough deal that he says 3 times that this is a great evil. There is no lasting joy in the things that we seek, not in riches, not in fame, not in pleasure, just like Jeff preached about last week. All the stuff we have will either break before we die, or we die before it breaks, one way or the other. We'll never we'll never gonna find our joy in our stuff. We're not gonna find our joy in the things that we run after in sin.
Speaker 2:God offers it to us. And in worship, we accept it. He is the one who satisfies us. He's the one that we can be satisfied in when we talk to our neighbors who don't know Him. When He says, I want you to talk to this person, When you act in obedience, you act in satisfaction of who God is and what He's done and entrusted Him.
Speaker 2:And out of that comes joy. Out of obedience comes joy. In Psalm 23, it even says that he sets his table before us in the presence of our enemies. And remember that that from earlier in the scene, we talked about how this is, there's sexual tension here. And I think we've now kind of reached the the high point of the story.
Speaker 2:I think this is central to understanding it. It's not an accident that this happens in this romantic setting, that this interaction takes place here, because God is telling his love story. He he has picked an adulterous woman to woo, but he does not seek her as she has been sought by other men. He's not coming to take from her, but rather to give to her, endlessly. He didn't pick her because she was good, but he did pick her.
Speaker 2:In a truer sense than either Isaac or Jacob, Jesus came to this well to meet his bride. He did not come for a temporary lover or even a lifelong spouse, but rather to captivate a soul with such bliss and happiness that it will not grow dull in 10000 generations in eternity. That when He comes to seek us as worshipers, to turn us into people who are satisfied in him, that is an unbelievable love story. It's an unbelievable act of of grace and mercy that he would reach out for us. And it, it thrills me.
Speaker 2:I couldn't I couldn't sit up here and just be objective about this. Not a very emotional person. But as I was preparing this message, I practiced a couple of times, I I I get fired up about it. Like, when sometime I found myself talking faster and faster, and one time I felt like I was about to cry. It it is endlessly amazing to me that God would look at us, all of us are are much farther off from him than some Samaritan woman is to some Jewish man.
Speaker 2:All before an almighty God, we we have nothing we can claim. We're miles farther than she was. We've done much worse things in his sight. And yet he comes to give us this fullness of joy. And we call it a discipline when we respond in worship.
Speaker 2:We we talk about that as work. We talk about that as something we have to like, oh, I'm gonna try a little bit harder. We make it into some practice that we try to get into, some some law that we can obey. I don't, you know, I think one of the reasons there's so few instructions about worship and scripture is that no one needs to be told to worship God when they see Him. No one has to be told, oh, when an angel of the Lord shows up before you, make sure you act appropriately.
Speaker 2:You know, it is it is protocol that you bend your knees, that you don't look over that never happens. When people come face to face with the God that made the world and yet descended down, made himself nothing, emptied himself, took on our sin, and defeated it, that we might have everlasting joy, no one should have to tell you to be happy about that. And if we if there's a discipline in here, it is in meditating and bending our lives around, remembering God's goodness, his gospel, seeking after his face. For I tell you surely that the more we see him, the more our joy will be complete. He is a cistern that holds water and that that water, once we've had a taste of it, springs up unto eternal life and we will never thirst again.
Speaker 2:So let me quickly summarize and be done. God is the object of our worship. We truly worship Him when we experience and express our true satisfaction in who He is and what He's done. And one of God's purposes in worship is that we would find joy, that we would be happy, and that we would know that the joy that comes from him is greater than any other joy, and in particular, is greater than the counterfeit buzz of sin. God wants us to worship him in all of our actions by doing justice, by acting kindly, by showing love to all people.
Speaker 2:And the new testament in particular, de emphasizes outward acts of religious worship. Take no confidence in your attendance at church as making God happy about how you worship him. He is pleased to receive our worship and pours out joy on us when we show that we are satisfied with who he is. To him be glory forever. Let me pray for us.
Speaker 2:Oh, God, that we would see you, we would know you. And it says in Ephesians, when when Paul prays, that we would be strengthened so that we would know you and then be strengthened some more so we could handle it, that we could hold it in, that we could stay together in the light of the glory and the joy that you offer us. God, may our hearts be soft. May you take out the heart of stone and replace with a heart of flesh. That as we look and we meditate upon your gospel, as we see it played out in our community, in our own lives, in our families lives, our kids.
Speaker 2:Oh God, that we would respond with joyful worship. That we would seek to see you because in seeing you, we would know you. It can sound boring to think of worshiping you forever and ever. It's because I don't know who you are. Or if the earth were to last a 1000 times what it has lasted, we would not begin to express the possible joy of of knowing you, of seeing you.
Speaker 2:And I pray that you thrill our hearts even in an anesthetized culture, that you would thrill our hearts with who you really are and be transformed by it. God, do that work in this church. Do it for your glory. God, we ask that you start doing it even now. It's in Christ's name that we pray.
Speaker 2:Amen.
