FHBC Sermon Notes

Yesterday we gave our water on a hot day around town, today we proclaim that well that we have come to know. The source of all life, the living water, Jesus.

Jesus is traveling through Samaria which was an area and people typically despised by the Jews of the time. Yet, Jesus had a very specific reason for going. He stopped at an important well, dug by the one of the patriarchs, Jacob. This was important to both the Jews and Samaritans. There he meets a women who is alone at the well, at noon, a strange time for a women to be getting water.

Some 700 years earlier the Assyrians had conquered the are in Samaritans, and so they had been mixed with other peoples and many Jews and the Samaritans themselves didn't consider themselves separate. The woman noted very interesting points in this story. Jesus is breaking many barriers here, and the woman says this. "I'm a Samaritan.., I'm a woman"

His answers to her questions are telling? "If you knew the gift of God..." she would ask for water. So...
Three Questions
1. What is the living water that Jesus offers?
Living water sometimes refers to moving fresh water, like a river or stream, in contrast to stagnant water. In that place in the world, they had the dead sea, a stagnant water in which no living thing can live.

Sometimes we think of this living water as a respite, a solution to our earthly worries. We simply think Jesus is a way to an easier way, a method for having peace, the words of the wise teacher.

The living water offered here is greater than a temporary refreshment from trouble. No, it is the promise of new life, resurrection from the death we live in. That living water is Jesus himself. We do not simply follow the good example, we submit our entirety to his lordship. All the things we seek joy in now, all the ways we search for peace, and the effort and methods we try, they all fall short. We don't need things or self strength, we need a person. The person of Jesus.
So what is living water? It is a relationship with Christ.

2. What is the thirst that the living water quenches?

This seems to be a scandalous woman. The water she needs isn't a physical thirst. We think our greatest needs are food, shelter, and clothing. But the reality is is that our greatest need. We are not any different from this woman. We to are scandalous. We to have hidden ourselves. Our greatest need is not physical, but to know the forgiveness of God for all that we have done to break the relationship with him. We are the treacherous wife who has been offered the chance to come home.

3. What does it mean to worship the Father in spirit and truth?
Worship is not about coming to church on Sunday morning. It is allow God instead to fully guide and lead all that is our life. Without the spirit, we can not know the truth, the truth that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. To worship, to have relationship with God, all we need is Jesus. Just like the woman, who had been hiding from herself, her people, and her God, we need to leave our water bottle and proclaim the Messiah is here, God himself has come to say ME. Individually we have been bought, and together we stand in praise of Him!