Luke 4:16-30

“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.”

Jesus was teaching at the local synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, where his mother and other family members would also be in attendance. We believe it was Mary who actually provided Luke with most of the details about this particular event. As we read Luke’s account, we can easily imagine her sitting there listening to the whispered remarks of those around her, her awareness of their reactions heightened by her maternal sensibilities.

At first the audience appeared to be responding quite favorably to the things Jesus was saying. They expressed amazement at the gracious words falling from his lips and said to one another, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” But behind the outwardly positive reaction there was hidden an inward resentment. Here he was, this man who had grown up in their town and who had lived and worked among them for his entire life, and yet never once performed the kind of miracles that they heard he was doing elsewhere. And why not? Didn’t they also have those among them who were suffering with sickness and disease?

Jesus knew what was in their hearts and he exposed their resentment saying, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’ Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” (Luke 4:22-24)

He then went on to back up what he had just said with examples from the lives of Elijah and Elisha, two of their most revered prophets: “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

In Proverbs 9:8 it says, “Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you,” and that is exactly what happened when Jesus reproved the congregation at Nazareth. Jesus had not only wounded their pride, he had also challenged their deeply held prejudices regarding the Gentiles and their right to feel superior to them. Any fleeting sense of admiration that they might have had was immediately transformed into fury. They all rose up as an angry mob against him, and drove him out of town.

Their fury quickly escalated into a murderous rage, up to the point where they were about to throw him off a cliff at the edge of town. However, the timing and manner of his death was not going to be determined by this angry mob. Jesus simply walked right through the crowd and went on his way, leaving the small town of Nazareth behind him. It would never be his “hometown” again.

Luke 4:16-21

“He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

In his sermon to the congregation at Nazareth, Jesus began by taking up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and reading: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” and then he abruptly stopped, mid-sentence. The rest of the passage actually goes on to say, “and the day of vengeance of our God,” but Jesus didn’t read that part. Instead, he rolled the scroll up and handed it back to the attendant, and then he sat down.

An almost palpable sense of anticipation arises from the text in Luke as he describes this scene, telling us that the the eyes of everyone in the room were now fastened upon Jesus. He had the entire audience on the edge of its seat, wondering and waiting for what he was about to say. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus said. At this point everyone in the room burst into spontaneous applause!!  Wait… no, that’s NOT what happened! That’s what would have happened if someone like me had written the story. Only this isn’t a “story,” it’s a true account of something that actually took place, and the real reaction of the audience in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth was completely different.

But rather than focus on them, let’s go back and take a closer look at what Jesus just said. He said that he had been sent to proclaim freedom for the prisoners recovery of sight for the blind, and that he was going to set the oppressed free. (The Greek word translated as “oppressed” literally means “crushed, broken down, or shattered.”)

“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus was about to spend the next few years of his life fulfilling this verse in a temporal sense. He would transform the lives of multitudes, casting out demons and healing them of all manner of diseases. The lame would walk, the deaf would hear, the blind would see. But the ultimate and eternal fulfillment of this promise was to come through his death. It was through his death and resurrection that he would “lead captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8) and achieve the victory over sin.

Sin is the root cause of these afflictions – captivity, blindness, brokenness – they are ALL the result of SIN. It is sin that holds us captive, it is sin that blinds us, it is sin that shatters us. But Jesus can set us free! We are still living in the “year of the Lord’s favour” and the message of good news that Jesus preached to that congregation in Nazareth continues to be true for us today. We can choose to reject the message, like the congregation at Nazareth, or we can choose to believe it. There is still time for captives to be set free, for the broken to be restored, and for the blind to receive their sight. The day of judgment remains in the future; now is the time of salvation.(2 Corinthians 6:2)

Luke 4:14-30

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.”

In Luke, we are told that Jesus returned to Galilee in “the power of the Spirit,” teaching in synagogues and performing great miracles of healing everywhere he went, until he reached his hometown of Nazareth. When it came time for the Sabbath, Jesus went to his local synagogue as usual, but on this particular Sabbath he was also given an opportunity to teach. He started out his sermon by standing up to read a brief selection from the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1-2) and then sat back down, declaring, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Today’s focus will be on the opening statement from that portion in Isaiah, which Jesus had just unambiguously declared as a reference to himself, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.”

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…” – Jesus, who was God in the flesh, was empowered by God the Holy Spirit. In the book of Luke we are told that when Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended upon him “in bodily form like a dove” (Luke 3:22) and that after his baptism, Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit” (Luke 4:1). This is an example of the inexplicable mystery known to us as “the doctrine of the Trinity:” God as three Persons in one being.

“But,” you may ask, “how could Jesus, who was already God in the flesh, be filled by God the Holy Spirit?” Unfortunately, we cannot provide a satisfactory answer for that question! There are some things about God that we are just incapable of fully apprehending with our carnal minds. But we can take heart in the assurance that all of these questions will be answered once we are with him face-to-face. Then we will know him completely, even as he completely knows us. (1 Corinthians 13:12)

“Because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.” – The phrase “to proclaim good news” appears in the Greek as one word, “euaggelizó,” meaning “to announce good news,” and is derived from the same term from which we get the word, “gospel.”

This “good news” is the very same as that which was announced by an angel to those shepherds who were keeping watch over their sheep on the night Jesus was born (Luke 2:10). It is the same good news proclaimed by the John the Baptist in the wilderness (Luke 3:18), the same good news preached by the apostles after Pentecost (Acts 5:42), and the same good news that we proclaim today. This is The Gospel – it is, and always will be, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” (Romans 1:16) In these times when all we ever seem to hear is bad news, followed by more bad news, how marvelous to know we still have a message of good news to share with the world!

John 4:43-54

“Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe.”

After his conversation with the woman at the well, Jesus stayed in the Samaritan town of Sychor for another two days before continuing on his way to Galilee. The Bible doesn’t say whether Jesus performed any miracles of healing during this time with the Samaritans; instead it indicates that it was the things Jesus said, and not his deeds, which convinced them to believe in him. They themselves testified of this, telling the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Jesus next came to the small town of Cana, in the region of Galilee. (This was the same place where he had once turned water into wine.) The Galileans also welcomed his arrival, just as the Samaritans had, but their welcome of him was mainly due to the many miracles they had seen him doing in Jerusalem when they were all there for the Passover feast.

The news that Jesus had returned to Cana quickly spread throughout the entire region and eventually reached the ears of one of Herod’s royal officials who lived in the city of Capernaum, a distance of over twenty miles away. This man had a son who was desperately ill and very close to death, so he decided he would make the journey to Cana in order to seek Jesus out and persuade him to come back with him and heal his son. Here is the account of their conversation:

When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death. “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.” The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” “Go,” Jesus replied, “your son will live.”

The man took Jesus at his word and departed. While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “Yesterday, at one in the afternoon, the fever left him.” Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and his whole household believed.

“Unless you people see signs and wonders you will never believe.” – Jesus wasn’t just saying this about the man as an individual, but was actually lumping him in with all of the other Jewish people in the region. The Apostle Paul would later make a similar generalization when he said, “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom.” (1 Cor 1:22) This wasn’t meant to condemn the man, however, for Jesus went ahead and healed his son anyway – and because of that one miracle, the nobleman and his entire household ended up believing in Jesus.

But why would Jesus make such a generalization about the Jews, when they were the very ones whom God had chosen to reveal his glory on earth? Because it was true, that’s why. Nicodemus, the Pharisee, articulated this same somewhat skeptical attitude when he came to Jesus and told him, “We know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.” Even some of Jesus’s own disciples needed to see a sign before they could really believe. (John 2:11)

We see this pattern repeated over and over again in the gospels. Many sincere Jewish people traveled from all over to see Jesus because they truly wanted to believe in him, but they still needed a sign to complete their faith. Jesus never condemned them for this, instead, he had compassion on them – the blind received sight, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the deaf heard, the dead were raised, and the good news was proclaimed to the poor. (Matthew 11:5)

This is still the case today. God in his mercy reaches out to us as we are; he understands the human heart and he does not punish us by withholding his grace when our faith is weak. If we sincerely seek him, he promises that we will find him. (Jeremiah 29:13)

The Samaritans believed in him because of his words, the Galileans believed in him because of his works, but in both cases the the end result was the same – they believed.

John 4:28-42

“Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”

God is, and always has been, the Sower. He plants his seed in the hearts of men, and though it is his seed and his harvest, he allows us the privilege of laboring alongside him in the fields. And it truly is a privilege!

“How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” quotes Paul, as he reverse engineers the process of salvation in the epistle to the Romans:

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” (Romans 10:14-15)

The Samaritan woman was running upon her own beautiful two feet as she hastened back to the village, proclaiming to anyone who would listen, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did!” And they did come; they came in droves.

“Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.” – The Bible tells us that many people from the village believed in Christ because of the woman’s testimony. This nameless woman had played a major part in reaping this harvest of souls, and thus she had the exquisite honor of sharing in Christ’s joy with him.

“I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.” – The Holy Spirit is always at work within the hearts of those around us and he incorporates our simple acts of obedience into the process, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes, we may be helping to till the soil, at other times, we may be helping to water the plants, all the while not knowing what the final results of our labor will be. And we might never know, at least, not while we are living here on earth.

“Do you not say that it is yet four months and the harvest comes? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and see the fields, because they are already white toward harvest!” (Berean Literal Bible) – Once again, Jesus challenges his disciples to shift their attention away from the natural world to focus on the spiritual world. In the natural world, the newly sowed fields were only beginning to turn green, but in the spiritual world there was a ripe harvest ready to be gathered in.

Imagine the beautiful sight that met their eyes! Here comes the Samaritan woman, followed by a whole crowd of men and women eager to meet the one she spoke of; their flowing white garments mimicking the spectacle of a ripe barley field swaying in the midday sun. What a sharp contrast to the scene they had witnessed earlier that day when they glanced back to see their master seated at the well, weary and alone. But such is the glory of the unseen power of God at work – Seed and Sower, Water and Well – he alone is the source of all.

“Drip down, O heavens, from above, And let the clouds pour down righteousness; Let the earth open up and salvation bear fruit, And righteousness spring up with it. I, the LORD, have created it.” (Isaiah 45:8 NASB)

John 4:27-34

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

When the disciples last saw their master, he had been sitting at the well, too fatigued to go into town with them on their errand to buy food. They likely rushed through their purchases out of concern for him whom they had left behind. They didn’t know it, but during their absence something spectacular was happening back at that well. The centuries-old wall of hostility between the Jews and Samaritans was about to be breached. Soon, this region which had so long isolated itself from the truth would be set ablaze with the Gospel.

The disciples were surprised when they got back to find Jesus engaged in conversation with one of the local Samaritan women, but they didn’t bother to ask him what the two had been talking about. They were too focused on their mission of providing him with something to eat. They urged him to take some food, saying, “Rabbi, eat,” but Jesus didn’t appear to need it anymore. He told them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” And the disciples, oblivious to the fact that these words had a spiritual implication, wondered to themselves how he could have managed to get food during their absence.

I think that, at this point, they may have noticed a difference in Jesus since the last time they saw him. He was no longer weary and fatigued, but revived and refreshed. The grace of God had sustained him, just as it had when he had been in the wilderness for forty days. The disciples could not understand this for they were still thinking along natural lines, too dull to notice that something supernatural had taken place. So Jesus explained it to them further by saying, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

Please pause here with me to reflect upon this for a moment, for this one statement defines everything that Jesus ever said or did while he was on earth. Just as he had explained to his own earthly parents so many years before, he would always and only be about the business of his heavenly Father (Luke 2:49); from the very first to the very last, it was always, “Not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42) Contrary to popular belief, Jesus was not a revolutionary, he was not trying to “change the world” – his only desire was to do the will of the one who had sent him and to finish his work.

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me.” – This is such a simple statement, yet the profundity of it still lies beyond the reach of our own human comprehension. We, who are innately self-centered, cannot fathom a heart so perfectly aligned with the will of God. How foolishly presumptuous it is for us to speculate, “What would Jesus do?” How could any one of us ever know that? The only way we can hope for even a glimpse into the motivation of his sinless heart is by continuously seeking the will of our own heavenly Father and subjecting our own desires to his, up to the point where his will forms the base of our very sustenance. Because, after all, that is what Jesus would do.

John 4:25-30

“I who speak to you am he.”

As the disciples were approaching the well on return from their errand into town, the Samaritan woman capped off her conversation with Jesus by saying, “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Jesus responded, “I who speak to you am he.”

There’s no doubt about what Jesus is claiming here. He is letting her know in no uncertain terms that he is the Messiah. Contrast this with his not-so-direct response earlier, when she asked, “Are you greater than our father, Jacob?” (John 4:12) He didn’t say it then, but the answer had become obvious by now. Yes, he is greater than Jacob. He is the God of Jacob.

Realizing that Jesus would soon be traveling on with his companions, the Samaritan woman lost no time in hastening back to the town to spread the news that Messiah had come.

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him. (John 4:28-30)

Somehow, during her brief encounter with Christ, faith had taken hold within her heart. Let’s not make the mistake of taking her question (“Could this be the Messiah?”) as a sign that she still harbored any doubt. She did not pose that question in order for others to confirm her belief, but rather as a challenge for them to come and confirm it for themselves. And, apparantly, her argument was persuasive enough to cause a great many of the townspeople to drop whatever it was they were doing at the time and come with her.

This story of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman stands in contrast to his earlier one with Nicodemus. With Nicodemus, he was metaphorical and indirect, but with the Samaritan woman, he was more straightforward and personal. This is because Jesus approached each person who crossed his path as a unique individual; he didn’t rely on any particular method or formula for evangelism, for he could see within their hearts and already knew whether or not they believed in him. By the time he concluded his encounter with the Samaritan woman, he knew she was able to respond in faith to the truth which he spoke boldly and plainly.

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17 NASB)

John 4:11-26
“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The advent of Christ to earth signaled a time of transition within in the Kingdom of God. Things were changing – the crooked paths were being made straight, the roughs ways were being made smooth (Luke 3:5-6), the plan of redemption was unfolding. This is not to say that there were no “true” worshipers before this time, or that the genuineness of the Old Testament saints was being called into question, but rather that a new dimension of truth about God himself was about to be revealed, exemplified in the person and work of Jesus Christ. (Hebrews 1:1-3)

“God is spirit” – Within the context of their discussion about where God ought to be worshiped, Jesus reminds the Samaritan woman that God is spirit, so he is not confined to any particular place, but rather inhabits all of the heavens and the earth. Solomon, who built the first temple in Jerusalem, understood this fully. Before the work on the temple had even begun, Solomon declared:

“But who is able to build a temple for him, since the heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain him? Who then am I to build a temple for him, except as a place to burn sacrifices before him?” (2 Chronicles 2:6)

“His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” – In order to be clear about what is meant by the term “worship” as it is used within this passage, let’s see what Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance has to say about the Greek word, “proskuneó,” translated here as “worship”:

4352. proskuneó – From “pros” and a probable derivative of “kuon” (meaning to kiss, like a dog licking his master’s hand); to fawn or crouch to, i.e. (literally or figuratively) prostrate oneself in homage (do reverence to, adore) — worship.

However, let’s not delve too far down into the “dog and master” analogy, for Jesus did not refer to God as the Master but rather as the Father.  To worship God in this sense is to humbly show submission to someone who is inexorably higher and greater than ourselves. To worship the Father in truth, we must not only understand the truth about who and what he is, but also understand the truth about who and what we are in relationship to him.

“For they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” – So many of today’s Christian devotionals and worship songs focus on a God who is “crazy about us”; where we become the object of his adoration, rather than the other way around. But such hubris is antithetical to the very quality that God appears to value most in a person, namely humility:

“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things, and so they came into being?” declares the Lord. “These are the ones I look on with favor: those who are humble and contrite in spirit, and who tremble at my word.” (Isaiah 66:1-2)

We serve a high and holy God, whose ways are inscrutable. We cannot know everything about God, but he already knows everything about us. He knows all our weakness, all our foolishness, all our shame, all the ugly things that we don’t even know about ourselves, and the astounding thing is, he loves us anyway!

In his famous psalm of repentance, Psalm 51, David said, “You desire truth in the inward parts.” (Psalm 51:6) I think that there is something deep within the heart of man that instinctively understands this, and yearns for it as well – a desire for this raw connection with the heart of God, where we can stand with upturned faces before our heavenly Father, naked and unashamed, loving him and knowing that we are loved by him. This is only possible through Christ.

John 4:16-22

“Woman, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.”

The Samaritans lived in what had once been territory of the erstwhile Northern Kingdom of Israel, giving them jurisdiction over some ancient and very sacred landmarks. This helped to form their spiritual identity and fueled their assumption that, as descendants of Jacob, they were included among his beneficiaries in regards to the blessings foretold in the Torah. But they were also a very “mixed” race of people, and the sacred scriptures and religious customs they adhered to were a corruption of the teachings of Moses, mingled with the idolatrous traditions of the heathen nations included among their ancestry. So, although they observed the feasts, such as Passover, and used much of the same terminology as the Jews, they weren’t really worshipping the same God, but rather a “God” adapted to fit their own ideology.

All of this serves as a backdrop to the exchange taking place between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, and helps to explain why she would suddenly challenge him with a topic of religious controversy, just at the point when things were starting to get rather personal.

As outsiders “listening in” on this private conversation, we might assume that she just changed the subject in order to avoid talking about her deeper personal issues. But that wasn’t really the case. It wasn’t an attempt to steer the conversation away from deeper issues, it actually WAS the deeper issue; not her relationships with men, but rather her relationship with God. Who was she worshipping?

“Woman, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” – The phrase “believe me” is unique here, this is the only passage in scripture where Jesus uses it, and the fact that he further emphasized the phrase with “woman” lends an explicit significance to the words which follow. He was telling her that a time was coming when she, herself, would indeed worship the Father, his Father, the one and only true God.

“You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know”– Throughout Jewish history, there had always been a remnant of true believers living in the land of Judea. Enduring through the reign of one wicked king after another, persistent despite the oppression of heathen conquerors, we can see them personified in the likes of Simeon (Luke 2:25), Anna (Luke 2:36-37), Elizabeth and Zechariah (Luke 1:5-6), as well as Jesus’ own earthly parents. They all knew the God whom they worshiped – not some hybrid, semi-biblical idol concocted from their own traditions, but the true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Creator of heaven and earth; the One who was, and is, and is to come.

“For salvation is of the Jews.” – When Jesus said this, he wasn’t speaking to a group of people, he was speaking only to her, so it was said with the intent that she would be able to understand him. As a Samaritan, she wouldn’t be familiar with the messianic prophecies of Isaiah or Jeremiah, but she would be very familiar with the messianic prophecies contained in the books of Moses, especially this one, spoken by Jacob himself:

The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his. (Genesis 49:10)

As well as this one, spoken by Baalam:

I see him, but not here and now. I perceive him, but far in the distant future. A star will rise from Jacob; a scepter will emerge from Israel. It will crush the foreheads of Moab’s people, cracking the skulls of the people of Sheth. (Numbers 24:17)

Jesus was reminding her that the promised Messiah was to come from the lineage of Judah, the people that she now referred to as “the Jews.”

John 4:9-30

“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The Lord has long been calling out to those who are spiritually thirsty, inviting them to come and drink freely of the water that only he can provide. We can see this in the Book of Isaiah when he says, “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!” (Isaiah 55:1) and also in Jeremiah, where God describes himself as the “Fountain of Living Water” (Jeremiah 2:13; Jeremiah 17:13). So it’s not surprising that Jesus would extend this same invitation to the Samaritan woman at the well, knowing as he did the turmoil of her past and the unanswered questions of her heart.

The woman had been argumentative at first, protesting that Jesus didn’t have anything to draw water with, and why did he think his water was so great anyway? How could it be better than the water in her well, which had once belonged to Jacob himself? But Jesus patiently sidestepped her protests, brushing past the temporal in order to focus on the eternal – “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

She still didn’t get it, however. We can’t hear her tone of voice, but we can still discern the note of flippant skepticism within her response as she says, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” This woman is typical of so many of us who have toiled through life with our heads down, preoccupied with the immediate tasks necessary for daily survival, while inwardly our hearts yearn to worship our creator. We just don’t know how. It takes a supernatural encounter with the Lord to roust us from the stupor of our temporary existence and cause us to shift our gaze to what lies beyond.

“Go, call your husband and come back.” – This is not the hard sell tactic of a timeshare sales presentation (“both spouses required to attend”) this is the sound of Jesus drawing back the bow as he prepares to shoot an arrow straight into the painful recesses of her heart:

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.” (John 4:16-19)

Thunk! The arrow hit the target! We know this because she immediately says, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.” Or maybe it wasn’t so immediate. Maybe she took a moment of silent reflection before speaking again. In either case, it’s clear that she’s been jolted away from her mundane task of fetching water, for she begins to question him about spiritual things. As Jesus continues to talk with her, faith springs to life within her heart. She forgets her thirst, for she has discovered the Fountain of Living Water. Leaving her water pot behind, she rushes back into town to tell the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did; isn’t this the Christ?!”