John 4 - Stop, Drop & Listen
Distractions are a tool of the enemy that keep you from the truth.
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John 4 (ESV)
1 Now 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), 3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee.
4 And he had to pass through Samaria.
5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar,
near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
6 Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A 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.)
9 The 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.)
10 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.”
11 The woman said to him,
“Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep.
Where do you get that living water?
12 Are you greater than our father Jacob?
He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”
13 Jesus said to her,
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,
14 but 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.”
15 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.”
16 Jesus said to her,
“Go, call your husband, and come here.”
17 The woman answered him,
“I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her,
“You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’;
18 for
you have had five husbands,
and the one you now have is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”
19 The woman said to him,
“Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.
20 Our fathers worshiped
on this mountain,
but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”
21 Jesus said to her,
“Woman, believe me,
the hour is coming when
neither on this mountain
nor in Jerusalem
will you worship the Father.
22 You worship what you do not know;
we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
23 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.
24 God is spirit,
and those who worship him
must worship in spirit and truth.”
25 The woman said to him,
“I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ).
When he comes, he will tell us all things.”
26 Jesus said to her,
“I who speak to you am he.”
27 Just 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?”
28 So 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?”
30 They went out of the town and were coming to him.
31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”
32 But he said to them,
“I have food to eat that you do not know about.”
33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”
34 Jesus said to them,
“My food is
to do the will of him who sent me
and to accomplish his work.
35 Do 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 harvest.
36 Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’
38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor.
Others have labored,
and you have entered into their labor.”
39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.”
40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.
41 And many more believed because of his word.
42 They 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.”
43 After the two days he departed for Galilee.
44 (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.)
45 So when he came to Galilee,
the Galileans welcomed him,
having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast.
For they too had gone to the feast.
46 So he came again to Cana in Galilee,
where he had made the water wine.
And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill.
47 When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee,
he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son,
for he was at the point of death.
48 So Jesus said to him,
“Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.”
49 The official said to him,
“Sir, come down
before my child dies.”
50 Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.”
The man
believed the word that Jesus spoke to him
and went on his way.
51 As he was going down,
his servants met him
and told him that his son was recovering.
52 So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him,
“Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.”
53 The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.”
And
he himself believed,
and all his household.
54 This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.
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Previous DIG DEEPER posts on John
John 4 Summary
You've likely heard lots of things about the Samaritan woman at the well and how she and Jesus were the only ones there in the heat of the day because the woman was shunned by her community and couldn't come in the cooler hours of the day like the other women did. All this lady wants to do is get her water and get out of there. She certainly doesn't want to talk with Jesus about the ugliest aspects of her life.
Very few people really like deep conversation about things that really matter, so we've become masters distractionists to fend off having to talk about anything uncomfortable - especially things of religious import.
As you read about the encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well notice all of the efforts she makes to distract Jesus from having any sort of meaningful conversation:
v9 - Dismisses Jesus based on well established racial biases
v11 - Ignores Jesus' comment about living water because He can't even fetch His own regular water
v15 - Misses Jesus' comment about living water leading to eternal life and instead wants living water just so she doesn't have to do the hard work of drawing water each day (in other words, living water would solver her immediate felt needs)
v17 - Her coy response about not having a husband
v19-20 - She introduces a hot button topic to distract Jesus' penetrating questions
v25 - She tries one last time to sidetrack the conversation, essentially saying "Well, none of us can really know these answers anyways, so you can have your opinion and I'll have mine.
After all her efforts to distract the conversation, the Holy Spirit finally opens her eyes and heart and she becomes one of the first Christian evangelists. She runs to tell the very people in town that she had been working so hard to evade.
Dig Deeper
Spend time thinking today about what kind of distractions you create in order to not have to think about deep, eternal matters.
AAA Prayer :
ACKNOWLEDGE WHO GOD IS: God is spirit (v24) - the Savior of the world (v42)
ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH GOD'S WILL: Pray that God will help you stop creating distractions that keep you from talking about and listening to Him
ASK GOD FOR WHAT YOU NEED:
