29th Match 09
Jesus Came To Tell the Truth
John 4: 4 – 26
For our Lenten studies we are considering the phrase:
“This is what Jesus came to do’.
Now the best person to answer this is obviously Jesus himself.
In the hours before his crucifixion Jesus was questioned by the Roman governor Pilate.
Pilate said to him, “You are a king, then!”Jesus answered, “you are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Jn. 18:37
Jesus said the he came to tell us the truth.
We are living in an age when it’s difficult to recognise fact from fiction sometimes; what is true and what is false? There are more shades of grey than there have ever been.
The world no longer has a standard of absolute truth by which it can judge right from wrong. No local vertical.
Truth used to be a core value of society but in our Post Modern society truth has been replaced with tolerance; now everyone point of view is equally true.
Not only did Jesus say, “I have come to tell you the truth” but he also said, “I am the truth.”
Jesus is like the builders plum line – we can line ourselves up next to Jesus and know whether we are in or out of line with absolute truth. Whether we are living the truth or living a lie.
This brings us to our reading, a meeting between Jesus and a Samaritan woman typically called ‘the woman at the well’ – we don’t know her by any other name.
In the course of their conversation, Jesus is able to help her recognise her need for eternal life (Jesus also said, “I come that you may have life”) and in the process he uses the truth to convict her of her need for God.
This story is a wonderful example of power of ‘truth’.
So what lessons can we learn here?
First some background:
John tells us that Jesus had been ministering in the south of Palestine and he wanted to return to Galilee in the north and John makes this very interesting comment.
“Now he (Jesus) had to go through Samaria.”
This is interesting because, in Jesus day Jews did everything possible to avoid Samaritans, they simply didn’t like them; there was a lot of racial and religious prejudice and so Jewish people would sometimes add a day onto their journey just so they could avoid Samaria.
But not Jesus, for a reason unknown to the disciples, ‘Jesus had to go through Samaria’.
He was planning what we could call a divine appointment with a certain very troubled woman to whom he wanted to offer the ‘truth’.
So Jesus and the disciples took the Samaritan route and about the middle of the day – the heat of the day, Jesus sat down at the well at Sychar and his disciples went off to buy food.
When the woman comes to the well Jesus shocks her by asking her to give him a drink and we see why in the woman’s response:
‘Why is it that you a Jewish man would ever speak to me?” she said.’ vs.9
‘Jesus answered her, “if you knew the gift of God and who it is who asks for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” vs.10
Now there are two things to understand about this extraordinary meeting;
The first – is that this particular woman is a social outcaste, clearly shunned by the other women because of her immoral lifestyle.

This is why she is at the well, on her own in the middle of the day. The other women would come together for protection, in the cool of the day and yet, here she was having a conversation with the Son of God.
I doubt this could ever happen in any other religious context.
But Jesus came, ‘to seek and to save the lost’ and the Samaritan woman was certainly lost.
The second thing to note is that when Jesus talks about water she naturally thinks that he is talking about a physical thirst.
But Jesus is engaging her in at a much deeper level,
“If you drink the water that I am offering you, will never be thirsty again. I have something that will satisfy the deepest longings of your heart.”
Perhaps you can identify with Jesus words?
What deep thirsts or longings do you have for something missing in your life?
Jesus touches the raw nerve in the Samaritan woman’s life; he very quickly got down to the crux of her life.
“Why don’t you go and call your husband and come back and we will talk some more.”
That shook her – you see she had had a pretty chequered past.
“I don’t have a husband” she replied.
“Jesus said, “You have spoken the truth. You have had five husbands and the man you are now living with is not your husband.” vs. 18
But look what she does next?
She does what we all do when the conversation gets too close to home.
She changes the subject, “Let’s talk about worship? Do you think we ought to worship on this mountain?”
“Jesus answered, “Let’s not talk about worship let’s talk about your life.”
And so they do and near the end of the story she comes to recognise that this stranger is in fact God’s long awaited Jewish Messiah, the Saviour of the world.
And she goes back to her village and tells all the people and many of them also come to believe in Jesus as the Christ.
Now she had no idea that afternoon when she went to the well – that a whole new meaning, direction and purpose would be given to her life.
She could not have imagined how completely everything would change for her because of her conversation with the Lord Jesus.
There are four things that I want to share with you from this story.

Truth #1: We cannot hide our past from God
Who remembers as a small child, wondering how your parents could know so much?
As children we have the innate capacity to invent what seems to us to be the most convincing story justifying something we may have done wrong but somehow our parents can see right through it.

The problem is that we are still doing it with God. What is it that makes us think we can sneak something past the all-seeing eyes of God and the all-knowing mind of God?
Why do we still make excuses to God? We have been doing it ever since Adam and Eve lost their innocence in the Garden of Eden.
When God first created Adam and them Eve they were naked unashamed and living in perfect innocence.
But when they decided to disobey God, they immediately felt shame.
Sin led to shame. Shame led to secrets. And secrets made them feel like they needed to cover up.
And so, in the cool of the evening God came to the Garden and asked His first question on record: “Where are you?”
Can you imagine Adam and Eve’s guilt?
“What’s that you are wearing” (“What – this old thing?).
As if God wouldn’t notice that they were trying to cover up their shame and sin and secret!
And we try just as ineffectively as Adam and Eve to deal with the sin in our lives.
Let me suggest three things that we do, that are very ineffective attempts at dealing with our sin:
1. First we try to ignore it – this is living in a place of denial.

“I’m not really a sinner” or we minimise it “What I do isn’t so bad. Everyone is doing it.”

Usually the only reason we justify our sin or excuse ourselves is because we are simply not objective about ourselves.
We use the wrong measure.

The Bible says “We have all sinned and have fallen short of God’s standards.”
Another ineffective way we try to deal with sin is through compensation – “I’ll teach Sunday school, give some more money to the Church ….”

2. Perhaps by sheer determination resolve to do better, “I’ll never do that again”! But we can’t solve our problem this way?

3. Or maybe we do what this woman had done – She had given in to her lifestyle – she indulged her sin but it only left her guilt-ridden, ashamed and alone.
This attitude says ‘I can’t do everything perfectly so I might as well do everything wrong’.
But she didn’t escape the guilt and when Jesus asked her about it, she wasn’t about to tell him and so she tried to avoided his question.
But we are all guilty of doing exactly the same things?
We have this place in our life where we hide away all the rubbish that we don’t want anyone else to know about.

It’s a secret place in our mind or our heart that we don’t want anyone to discover or uncover and in the process it becomes very heavy and we become ashamed and afraid and we even hope that God won’t see.
But she couldn’t hide from Jesus and he exposes her deepest fear and shame with in just one simple phrase, ‘go bring your husband’.
And he said this for only one reason – not to condemn her but to heal her.

He knew that she couldn’t become a whole person on her own just as we can’t be healed from our sin and failure on our own.
We will remain spiritually thirsty until we are ready to say, “God, I know I can’t hide anything from you, so I’m going to tell you the whole truth”.
Step #1: Be honest with yourself and be honest with God.
Truth # 2: Jesus Knows all About us and Still Loves Us.
The reason we try to hide our sins from God is because we believe that God won’t like us if He discovers everything about us. We don’t like ourselves very much so why should God?
But just look at how tenderly Jesus talks to this woman. Jesus was always a great champion of women, in a society that demeaned women.
And we see it here. This would have been an unbelievable scene for Jewish people to witness in Jesus’ day. No-one wanted to speak to this woman unless they had to.
She would have been abused if she had gone to the well when the other women were there.
But Jesus, knowing everything about her, crosses the gender barrier, the racial barrier and the religious barrier – not to mention the fact that she was a woman of ill-repute – all in an effort to reach her with the truth.
This was more than God saying “I love the world” – this was God showing it.
This is the reason Jesus came – ‘to seek and to save that which was lost’ – by helping this woman see the truth about herself so that ran back into her village calling out ‘Come and see the man who told me…’

We might have, at some time, asked ourselves, “How could God love me, knowing all there is to know about me?”

The answer, at least in part, is because He not only knows about our past, He also knows about our future.
He knows about our potential and the plan He has for our life.

On my study wall at home, I had a little plaque “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future”.
This is why, if you have not yet responded to God wholeheartedly, I urge you to take the second step towards truth –

Step # 2: Believe that the One who knows you the best and loves you the most.
God knows you better than anyone else and loves you more than anyone else.

Truth # 3: Our Sin has Consequences.
Someone has said that sin is ‘fun on credit’. Have your fun now but you’ll have to pay later.
It’s true, but here is something that I have also learned. When we sin we don’t get to choose how much we pay.
What price can we put on our peace of mind and then there is the price that others have to pay for our sin – our children, our reputation or maybe our friendships.
Sin always has consequences and we have to expect to pay the price.

We have freedom to choose our actions, but we don’t get to choose the consequences.
Paul says: “What a person plants, he will harvest”.
If we plant selfishness, ignoring the needs of others – ignoring God – we will harvest a crop of weeds.
But the one who plants in response to God; letting God sanctify him, harvests a crop of real life – ‘eternal life’.
Q: Would you agree that this woman was living with the consequence of her sin?
It was a high price to pay. At a spiritual level she was thirsty, dry and empty.
She had most certainly learned that her sin had consequences.
Now, it wouldn’t have been very loving for Jesus, knowing all that he did about her, just to leave her in that condition – spiritually dead and thirsty.
God’s love always brings with it an offer of a new life, which leads to our final truth. But first take a 3rd step:
Step # 3: Understand that God loves you just the way you are, but He loves you enough not to leave you that way.

Truth # 4: Jesus is the only One Who can Satisfy Our Deepest Needs.
Jesus said to the woman “If you knew who I was, you would have asked me and I would have given you living water”. vs. 10
“Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him, will never thirst again. The water I give shall become in him a well of water, springing up to eternal life”. 4:14
Again and again, the Bible refers to spiritually thirsty people, and all through the Bible we are told that God is the only one who can quench our spiritual thirst.
Examples:
Ps 42: 1-2: “As the dear pants for streams of water, so I long for you O God. I thirst for God, the living God”.
Or Isaiah 12: “See, God has come to save. I will trust in Him and not be afraid. The Lord God is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation. With joy you will drink deeply of the fountain of salvation.”
Jesus said: “I will give to the one who thirsts, from the spring of the water of life, without cost”. Rev. 21: 6
Q. So how is my spiritual thirst satisfied? What do we have to do?
We must take the final step towards truth and confess our emptiness.
We must be honest with our self and honest with God
Charlie Brown once said: ‘Sometimes I lie in bed at night and ask, “Where have I gone wrong?” and a voice answers me, “This is going to take more than one night”.
There is often a lot of truth in good humour.
It can take us awhile to acknowledge the futility and emptiness of our life without God but at some stage we not only have to say,
“Lord, I am a sinner” but “I’m thirsty Lord for what only you can give”.
Many Christians are happy to acknowledge that Jesus died for their sin – but they have never actually confessed their thirst for something more.
We can be like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, delivered from sin but having not yet entered into the Promised Land.
It’s interesting that Jesus focuses directly on this woman’s thirst.
Jesus said in John 7: “If you are thirsty, come to me. If you believe in me, come and drink.” NLT
Q: My closing question: Are you thirsty – for a clean conscience and more of God?
Are you able to put your head on your pillow at night, guilt free without shame?
Do you experience the joy of the Lord as your strength?
Do you feel the warmth of God’s accepting love?
Jesus just wants to sit down next to us and say, ‘I am the only one who can make you right with God’.
And this is exactly what He is offering to do for us this morning.
Step 4 – Admit your emptiness and accept Jesus’ offer of satisfaction

Prayer
If you are thirsty and longing to satisfy the deep unmet needs of your life the God invites you to drink from the water of life and you will never be thirsty again.
All you have to do right now is say; “dear Lord, I admit my emptiness, forgive my feeble attempts of trying to fill my emptiness with anything less than you. I accept your free offer of eternal life and with your help Lord – I will follow you.
With your help, I commit my life totally to you. Amen.