Here we are, in week ten of our study on what it means to be the church. When I and our other leaders first envisioned this series, we wanted to press pause on the series we were in in 1 Samuel so that we could intentionally hit the reset button for us as a church.

After nearly fourteen years of planting and pastoring this church, I wanted to get back to the heart of what it means to be the church and hopefully catch a fresh vision for what we believe God has called us to do as a church. We have traveled a lot of miles over the fourteen years of our existence. We have weathered a lot of ups and downs. This last year alone was definitely one for the history books. We lost a lot this last year. We walked through some very painful things together, and we wanted to spend some time with this series redirecting our hearts back to what it means to be the church so that we do not get stuck in a rut or cease to grow.

We have learned a lot together over the last fourteen years. We have made plenty of mistakes, traveled down some side roads that I hope we never need to travel down again, witnessed a lot of miraculous things, grown in our love for Jesus, lost some dearly loved people, gained some new brothers and sisters in Christ, fought sin together, pursued holiness together, and tried to love those outside our doors with every ounce of energy and resources we could muster. 

It has been quite the ride from a group of six, fourteen years ago, to where we are at today. Everything we have studied so far over the last ten weeks culminates in the passage before us today. It is after all the foundational text for the name of our church. Years ago, when we chose the name, The Well, from this passage, we said that we wanted to be a church for people who do not like church.

We wanted to run a relational rescue mission within a yard of hell. By God’s grace, this really is who we are today. Our church family along with the ministries we have launched really does embody our sense of mission in this world. But my hope is that we would hear this passage with fresh ears, and willing hearts, and that God would give us a fresh vision for what it means to be the church family here at The Well.

THE STORY OF A YOUNG PASTOR…

One of my oldest memories of hearing this passage preached was roughly twenty some years ago early on in my relationship with Jesus. A pastor, who was leading a men’s Bible study in the church I was part of who later became a good friend and mentor to me, started his sermon on this passage with a story about another young pastor of a small ultra-conservative church in a little town off the beaten path in Western Nebraska.

As the story went, this young pastor was in his second year of ministry in this little ultra conservative church in this little town when he decided to visit the local bar in the middle of the week around the middle of the afternoon. This little bar was the regular gathering place for most of the people who never graced the doors of his small church in this little town.

The people of his church had let it be known that this little bar was typically full of some of the worst people in town, drunks, addicts, sexual deviants, criminals, you name it and that was the kind of people who regularly gathered there. It was even rumored that the town prostitute hung out there around the lunch hour and after to avoid the women in town – whose husbands she often marketed her services to.

The church people had often warned this young pastor that this was no place for any self-respecting man of God to be found in; as it goes with the ultra-conservative crowd, men of God should avoid the appearance of evil at all costs, so they do not cause others to stumble into sin. Ultra conservative Christians would say: Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t get tattoos, and don’t date women that do!

This philosophy – or application of God’s Word – never sat right with this young pastor’s soul because he believed that the message of the gospel was meant for everyone. He also knew that the people in his little town may never meet Jesus unless he went to them in their neck of the woods.

So, he took a major risk, and he walked into that little bar in the middle of the afternoon took a seat at the bar and waited for whomever he could strike up a conversation with. And low and behold, the town prostitute came walking through the door, scantily clad in skin tight clothing accentuating the curves of her body, lots of skin showing, all dolled up with heavy makeup, hair cascading down the center of her back with a little part of it flowing down her shoulder, with the strong scent of her perfume in the air. She was what most may call an absolute smoke show!

The bar was mostly empty except the bartender, so she walked up casually to the young pastor and took a seat on the stool right next to him, somewhat uncomfortably close. What happened over the next few moments radically changed this young woman’s life forever, not to mention the impact on the entire town. This is where we find Jesus in our passage today – walking through the doorway of that scuzzy little bar – in a place where no self-respecting religious man would ever go.

1Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2(although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 4And he had to pass through Samaria. 5So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.

7A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8(For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10Jesus 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.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 13Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” 16Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” 17The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” 19The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” 21Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But 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. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will teach us all things.” 26Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

27Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” 28So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29“Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” 30They went out of the town and were coming to him. 31Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32But he said to them, “I have food that you do not know about.” 33So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” 34Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. 35Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for the harvest. 36Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

39Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40So when the Samaritan’s came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41And many more believed because of his word.42They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”

#1: JESUS GOES TO SAMARIA (VV. 1 – 6)

When John tells us in verse 4 that Jesus “had to pass through Samaria” on his way from Judea to Galilee, we should get the sense that Jesus went to Samaria based upon a Divine mandate. There is a ton of Jewish history that we do not time to get into the weeds with today. But suffice it to say, the people of Samaria were hated by the Jews. No self-respecting Jewish person would travel to or through Samaria because the Samaritan people were viewed as half breeds, social outcasts, and filthy outsiders.

Samaritans would not be found worshipping in the local Jewish Synagogues. Samaritans had their own places of worship – kind of an early day segregation of sorts. But there was a well in that little town of Sychar that had been built by Jacob – the Father of the twelve tribes of Israel – long before the Samaritans became an object of Jewish hatred.

That very well is where Jesus grabs a stool and begins waiting for someone to come along. You see, God’s provision for the conversation that is about to take place, began long ago when that well got built, long before the Samaritans ever became the outcasts they were on this very day.

All Jesus is doing is following a Divine mandate to seek and to save the lost no matter how filthy society says they are and no matter how filthy the places are where they hang out at. Jesus is not afraid of our filth. He is not afraid of going to the filthiest of places to have the hardest conversations with some of the world’s most difficult people.

#2: JESUS RELATES TO A PROSTITUTE (VV. 7 – 26)

This fact that Jesus is not afraid of our filth is made abundantly clear when he engages in a relational conversation with a prostitute in verses 7 – 26. There is no way to fully cover all the minute details of the conversation in these verses in the time we have together today. I hope that you will take my short summary and do your own in depth study over the course of the next week.

When Jesus relates to the prostitute at the well, he essentially engages her in a lovingly, prophetic, and evangelistic conversation. In verses 7 – 14, he uses a drink of water to spark the conversation, he capitalizes on the woman’s shock over the fact that he is even speaking to her, and he moves straight into her need to know him as the tall fresh drink of living water through whom she could gain eternal life.

Jesus’ offer of eternal life – through living water – piques the woman’s curiosity since well water is typically stagnant water unlike the living water that comes out of a stream. So, in verses 15 – 19 she asks Jesus for some of that water – some living water – at which point Jesus aims deeper into this woman’s story when he prophetically highlights the fact that this woman has had five husbands and is not married to the one, that she is shacking up with at the moment, and is more than likely coming to the well at midday to avoid the women whose husbands she had been sleeping with.

Of course, this recognition from Jesus, that the woman is a prostitute, makes her uncomfortable. Jesus’ only aim here is to speak truth in love – the kind of truth that recognizes our filthiness but offers redemption at the same time. So, in verses 20 – 26, she tries to cover up her own shame by shifting the conversation to a question about religious preferences, which plays right into Jesus’ hand because his entire aim was to get to the heart of this woman’s worship dysfunctions. She has been worshipping at the feet of the men she keeps sleeping with and she is worried about worship locations – but God is more concerned about people who will worship him in spirit and in truth.

The reality is that you and I worship what we love. Just like this woman, our addiction to sin is proof that we need someone to set us free from our love of sin so that we can begin to worship God in spirit and in truth; we need a Savior, a Messiah to set us free from our worship dysfunctions.

This woman begins to recognize that, so she asks Jesus if he is the Messiah and he says in verse 26, “I who speak to you am he.” That must have been a mic drop moment – just like the first time you and I realize that our lives are an absolute mess without God and that Jesus is right here calling us to trust him and to believe in him for salvation so that he can radically transform our lives.

#3: JESUS RELATES TO THE DISCIPLES (VV. 27 – 38)

You have to marvel at the fact that when our filthy lives are laid bare before the Lord, that he still offers us his unconditional love and the gift of redemption in the bloody cross and the empty tomb of Jesus. It should shock us that the God of the universe would give us the chance to be made new, to be made right, and to be in relationship with him.

That shocking alarm that we feel when we really come to grips with the depths of our sin and the never-ending amount of the love of Christ, that shock and awe is similar to what the disciples may have felt when they came back and found Jesus hanging out with a prostitute. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in those moments!

In verses 27 – 38 the disciples come back and find Jesus in deep conversation with none other than the Samarian prostitute from the filthy little city of Sychar. They never ask the question, but they do wonder why Jesus is talking to her and what he wants with her (v. 27). The woman heads back into town and shares her testimony of meeting “a man who told me all that I ever did” who must “be the Christ” which piques the curiosity of the town’s people, because she invites them to “come see” the man of my dreams and they begin their trip to the well to meet this man she is talking about (vv. 28 – 30).

In the meantime, the disciples, still in shock over the fact that Jesus was talking to this woman, instead of asking Jesus their deeper questions about his interactions with her, try to get him to eat something (v. 31). They are worried about his appetite, but Jesus lets them know that his appetite is satisfied – not by getting something from the woman like many other men had done before him – but by accomplishing the Father’s will in offering her something that will satisfy her appetite for all eternity (vv. 32 – 34).

The bottom line to Jesus’ conversation with his disciples is that he is modeling God’s heart for the lost and that their job as his disciples is to be like farmers who sow, reap, and work hard to see others come to trust in Jesus for eternal life (vv. 35 – 38) as the fishers of men that he had already called them to become.

Once again, Jesus does not avoid the hard conversations even with his own disciples. The reality is that all of us are like the woman at the well and we are all surrounded by people who are just like the woman at the well – people who need to hear and believe in Jesus for eternal life.

#4: HEARING & BELIEVING JESUS AT THE WELL (VV. 39 – 42)

In the final movement of our story today, John tells us in verses 39 – 42, that “many Samaritans from that town believed in [Jesus] because of the woman’s testimony” and that after spending two more days with these Samaritans at the well, the people who believed told the woman that “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world”.

I have always said, you do need to hear me as a preacher but more importantly than hearing me is that you need to hear Jesus for yourself. My job and everyone’s job who is a disciple of Jesus – everyone who claims to be a Christian – our job is to speak in alignment with Jesus as he speaks through the voice of his Spirit through his Word. That is exactly what happened in this dirty little town, off the beaten path, beginning on a bar stool with a conversation between a religious man and the town’s prostitute.

KEY TAKE AWAYS – APPLICATION…

This story is the story of who I believe God has called us to be as a church family at The Well. As I said earlier, we should all see ourselves as that woman at the well surrounded by other people who are like that woman at the well.

Ultimately, if you are not a believer and you are hearing this message today, then I want you to know that Jesus went out of his way to give his life as a payment for your sin at that bloody cross. All you have to do is surrender in trust and belief in him and ask him to change your life, and he will be faithful to do it.

If you are a believer today, I think there are some key take aways and points of application that I want to highlight briefly for you as we get ready to conclude here in a few moments. My hope is that these key take aways will help us to catch a fresh vision for what it means to be the people of The Well.

#1: Jesus chose the hard places, the difficult people, and the hard conversations. Don’t avoid the hard places, the difficult people, and the difficult conversations. Do the hard thing. If Jesus carried that cross and died in your place, and you have trusted in him for salvation, then you have the Spirit of God living inside you and he will enable you to do the hard things.

#2: Jesus is the answer to our worship dysfunctions. Do not be a pretender. Worship God in spirit and in truth. Be honest about your brokenness and your sin as you come to him and ask him to renew your heart and to transform your life. Do not get lost in the weeds and put on fig leaves of religious performance and religious language. Do not be a fake. Do not pretend. Be real and be honest and give yourself completely to Jesus and he will make you into the worshipper – the lover of God – that you were designed to be.

#3: Jesus’ mission, vision, and ministry activity will be alarming sometimes. Do not let the alarming fear of a momentary ministry opportunity knock you off your evangelistic game. Those dark places, those difficult conversations, and those difficult people, can be intimidating. Do not let them knock you off your game. You are not there to win arguments or to prove how intellectually or spiritually superior you think you are. You are there to lovingly share truth as the Lord gives you the opportunity. Let God’s will – as alarming as it may be – be your daily food. Find satisfaction and fulfillment in being used by God to spread the love and the sacrifice of Jesus to others around you.

#4: The community at the well believed because the testimony of the woman aligned with the voice of Jesus. Do not walk away from Jesus and keep him to yourself. Let your light shine in the darkest of places, with the darkest of people, in alignment with the voice of Jesus. Do not shortcut the work of the gospel or leave the work to someone else to do. Be willing and available to patiently go the distance with others just as Jesus spent two days with the woman and the people from her town at the well.

CONCLUSION…

In conclusion, I will leave you with four basic questions to ask yourself as you try to listen to the Spirit of God in regard to your part of being part of the church family at The Well.

#1: What hard places, people, and conversations do I need to quit avoiding?

#2: Where do I need to stop pretending so I can worship God in spirit and in truth?

#3: What kind of fear has knocked me off my evangelistic game?

#4: Where does my testimony need to get in better alignment with the voice of Jesus?

I remember how I felt after hearing my friend share the story of the young pastor in the bar with the local prostitute. Once he made the turn and connected it to Jesus, I realized that this story was the story of my life. I grew up far from the Lord in a super dysfunctional family. But God in his kindness sent a handful of people to the dirtiest of places, to dirty old me, to have difficult conversations, to share the good news of the gospel in alignment with the voice of Jesus as he drew me to himself.

Jesus finally saved me in the middle of the street after a near death experience on my motorcycle when I was at the lowest and filthiest point of my life. He effectively pulled up a stool right next to me, called me out for my sin and my rebellion, pointed out the futility of my life, and called me to trust and to believe in him for eternal salvation. From that moment forward, I have lived my life – through various seasons of brokenness – as one who wants to see others find eternal life through the voice of Jesus.

When I survey the church family here at The Well, I see a group of misfits, people from all walks of life, who are being saved out of some of the most difficult, broken, backgrounds and are being transformed into the worshippers of God and the proclaimers of the gospel that we were designed to be.

Do not loose heart because we experienced a difficult year last year… or any year for that matter. That cross was bloody, that tomb is empty, and the promise of heaven is true because he who died on that cross, he who left that tomb empty, and he who promises eternity to all who believe, was tenacious enough to grab a bar stool right next to us as he called us into relationship with him. – Amen!

1 Unless otherwise specified, all Bible references are to the English Standard Version Bible, The New Classic Reference Edition (ESV) (Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, 2001).