Preparation for the Harvest

In order to use my blog in a more effective manner (meaning, actually use it regularly) and to communicate the truth of Scripture in a more consistent way, I am going to begin posting a summary/condensed version of the Sunday morning message. Below is from the message yesterday, August 12, which is message 11 from our series through the Gospel of John.

John 4.1-42

Jesus has moved from the valley of Aenon to a Samaritan village called Sychar. Wearied from the journey (which entails walking the natural landscape, not driving on paved interstates -- even if some have potholes; heat and elements, not A/C; grumbling disciples, not kids who can be pacified with an ipod or in car DVD), the entourage stops at a well used by Jacob (Israel) and his descendants. The disciples go into town to look for food and Jesus encounters a woman who has come out around noon to draw water from the well. After Jesus asks her for a drink of water, a discussion commences that teaches you and I much about the salvation Jesus offers and what it is that we are to do about it as Christians. John takes this conversation and highlights many important themes from who Jesus is, to what Jesus offers, to worshiping God, to the harvest of lost souls needing salvation.

Familiar story, right? Most of us can remember hearing the story of the woman at the well from our earliest years in Sunday School. The problem is that most of us gloss over the depth of the message presented, which betrays our practical low view of Scripture and the God who inspired it (2 Tim. 3.16 - "God breathed". We belittle these narratives to a familiar and commonplace "story" that has taught us to "be nice to strangers" or digress into a discussion of the race relations between the Jews and the Samaritans and how we should be considerate of people of different ethnic backgrounds because "that's what Jesus did." Why, then, of all the things that God could have chosen to include in His holy, infallible, and inerrant Word, which is to be our guidebook as believers in Christ, did he choose to include that message? Is it just to teach us to be moral or does it have a deeper meaning? This is what I mean when I say that our low view of Scripture and the God who inspired it is betrayed when we approach narratives like the woman at the well in this fashion.

If we follow the contours of the narrative we see four movements after the initial setting is given in verses 1-6. In movement 1 (v. 7-15), Jesus encounters the woman at the well and a wonderful contrast develops through their discussion. The first is that over the water given. Jesus asks for well water, but then offers an ever flowing spring of living water. This baffles the woman who takes the observant route in noting that Jesus doesn't have a rope or a bucket, so how is He going to acquire this water? She fails the see the lesser to greater comparison of what she can get by herself versus what Jesus alone can give as God's gift (v.10). She defers to Jacob (Israel), the father of their race and the giver of this well. This is a high regard for the people of Israel (even the half breed Samaritans), so surely this vagabond begging for a drink is not greater than him. But Jesus' response further illuminates the divide between who He is and who Jacob was, what He alone offers and what Jacob left behind. Her response is to ask Jesus for a taste of what it is He is giving.

This carries us into movement 2 (v. 16-26), where Jesus does the imitable thing in addressing the sin issues of this woman's heart in order that she could receive the living water He offers. Too often in our evangelistic fervor we are more concerned with the notch in the belt than we are clearing the sin pit that the Gospel was given to fill. Not Jesus, He takes her right into her adultery. Note He does not condemn her for her sin, nor does He blast her with the pejoratives of her lifestyle. Not once does He call her a whore, a prostitute, etc. Rather, He affirms her truth filled statement that she does not have a husband. Her response is much like ours when sin exposed. We have the propensity towards deflection. We want the attention somewhere else, but often times, as in her case here, it only reveals another sin issue. She asks about the location of worship, betraying the idolatry of location, rather than the focus on the person Who is to be worshiped. Jesus, again, gently teaches her about the sin she is allowing to hinder her. Notice I did not say Jesus affirms her actions in either of these cases. He confronts them head on. We can learn from this. No one gets truly saved when we overlook the sin. We do not judge the sin, we confront it and allow repentance and restoration to work through the power of the Cross. It is under these circumstances that Jesus affirms that He is the messiah, the Christ, the saving one.

Movement 3 (27-38) looks at another contrast. The woman who leaves her pot behind and goes back to Sychar to tell the men of this one man who has told her story back to her. As George Borchert points out, the fact that she went to the men should not be overlooked, for many of them were no doubt part of her own story given the lifestyle she lived. She had met Christ, had her sin addressed, and now she wanted others to experience the same. The disciples on the other hand, have missed it again. They went to get food and now Jesus did not want to eat, saying that He had food of which they did not know (32). His food is not physical, but spiritual in that His fulfillment is doing what God sent Him to do. Remember His words in Luke 19.10: "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost" (NASB). It is under this that he is able to direct His disciples away from thinking of merely physical things to the great harvest that is around them. His command to them in verse 35 is the same command He gives to us today to compel us to quit focusing on ourselves and begin focusing on the things of God. He says, "Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest" (NASB). The Spirit of God was already at work around them (36-38), stirring in the lives of the people that they might receive the gift of God and the disciples were missing it. All they had to do was harvest (38). I am so glad that movement 4 (39-42) shows us that the harvest was made. Two parts to this harvest: part one from the woman who testified (39) and part two from those who heard Jesus for themselves (41-42).

And our main idea get from the woman and the disciples is that preparation for the harvest requires people to understand the truth of who Jesus is. She got it, the disciples didn't and look at the results. I am convinced that you and I are at a very telling double front precipice. On one front, we can cast our nets and draw a huge harvest. Our culture is basically begging us to be men and women of God and to be a Gospel witness. We live in such a crucial and dark age, but God is still working around us. I know this because our church has been blessed be a part of 24 baptisms in the past 10 months. We are breaking forth in new ministries, people are wanting to know more about God and His Word. On the other front, we face the danger of careening head long into apathy and ignorance of what it is that God is doing in our community. This is not a safe endeavor for us individually, corporately as the church, and even more so as the bearers of light to a world of darkness. We are not talking about maintaining what we have, we are talking about depriving others of the life giving water of Christ Jesus, which is blatant disobedience to the Word of God. Let me draw out three points of application here to tie in everything we have discussed.

1. Many of us are standing at the well, but we are not drinking the water. We come to church, we sit in Sunday School, we might even tithe regularly, but we have not really taken the life given water Jesus offers. Think about the offer here. Jesus is promising living water, but we readily and consistently settle for the stagnant water. The word group for "living water" can also be used for "ever running", "springing up", or "constantly renewing". Stagnant water on the other hand must be refreshed. If we are trusting in what we are doing in and of itself, we are running to the algae filled stagnant water time and time again in order to get our lips wet. We do this because we have not taken the offer of Jesus' life giving water seriously. We avoid opportunities to depend on faith, thinking we have to fill ourselves with the world's indulgences (be it sex, drugs, clothes, work, money, alcohol, sports, laziness, etc) and we have to keep going back to get more and more because it does not satisfy. However, Jesus offers an everflowing spring that will constantly renew itself and refresh us by His Holy Spirit. The adage rings true in the church that you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. We must freely choose to drink the water that Jesus stands ready to give. It alone can fill us and satisfy us. Better put, this is how Jesus says it in v. 14 "whoever drinks of the water that I will give will never be thirsty forever" (emphasis added).

2. Sin issues will always hold us back from truly knowing Jesus. If preparation for the harvest requires that we know Jesus in truth, sin will preclude that knowledge. We cannot be intimately connected with a Holy God through His Holy Spirit based on the holy blood of His sinless Son if we are infested with an array of sins. This is why Jesus addressed the woman's sin issues when she asked Him for His living water. However, we want to classify sin and keep some sin to ourselves as a pet. The problem with pets is that they always make a mess. I don't care if you have house trained your pet, they will make a mess. Sin makes a bigger mess. Jesus didn't come and die on a Cross only for some of your sins or only the sins you want to confess. He died for ALL sins, so your pet sin is an affront to the sacrifice he made for you. Some sin is grossly overt. This is what we see initially with the woman at the well. It doesn't take much theology or church talk to understand that adultery, murder, stealing, etc are all sinful and wrong actions. It doesn't even take much confrontation to address obvious sins like cursing, anger, violence, lying, gossip, etc. These we must address as soon as they appear.

However, sin is not always so obvious. Let me give you two examples from our text today. We see also from the woman that some sin is focused on the trivial. She asks a question to divert the conversation which had now turned to her. This question was concerned with the location of worship. Jesus trivializes her concern by saying it does not matter where you worship if you are worshiping the wrong God in the wrong way. He is pointing past a location or a building to who God is and why He is to be worshiped through Christ in Spirit and truth. Anything less was a trivial waste of time. This is a sin that plagues the church. We focus on buildings, budgets, numbers, programs, events, and everyone else's problems with no regard to the end of those means. Are these (and any other you want to add to the list...politics, sports, etc) bad things? No, but if we stop with them we have forgone the reason they exist, which is to point to the true and living God. We will never be prepared for the harvest because we have diverted our attention to trivial matters that distract from who God is and what He is doing.

Closely related to that are the sins that focus only on the physical. This was the problem of the disciples (31-33). They were more concerned with who brought Jesus the Spicy Chicken Sandwich combo from Chick-Fil-A than they were about the work of God around them. This is a trivial matter as well. This is one that plagues the individuals of the church. We get more concerned with what we can control (the physical) that we do not invest in what God has directed (the spiritual). No, I'm not some crazed mystic. But I see this day in and day out. We get concerned with what people think, what we have or don't have, what we can do about it, that we cease to allow God to use us. By the way, this is one of Satan's favorite sins for us because it seems so innocent. It is a good thing to be at your kid's ball games, to have a good job, to provide for your family. But, when that focus takes over we have lost a grip on the reality that we have fallen prey to sin. All sin (whether the big ones or the little, easy to overlook ones) affects the orientation of the heart. This will always cause us to fail to see Jesus for who He truly is and conduct our lives in a manner worthy of the calling He has placed on us in salvation.

3. Truly knowing Jesus will force us to seek His harvest. This is the intimacy of salvation being played out. What He has given us, we want to share with others so we will constantly look for ways to get His Gospel into their lives. I say "truly knowing" because that is what is demonstrated for us in our passage. In verse 10 He identifies Himself as the giver of living water, or the well spring of eternal life and the woman takes that message to the people who identify Him as the One who "is indeed the Savior of the world" (42). See the connection of who He truly is to the harvest? Further, when we partake of His living water, the joy of doing so will thrust us into the paths of others. This is the woman's response in v. 28. She was so excited about what Jesus was doing that she ran to tell others. And, finally, we will begin to understand that our testimony is used by Christ to draw all men unto Himself. That is the outcome of the woman's testimony in v. 28 and 39.

Please join me in preparation for the harvest. God is doing some amazing things in our world. We are charged with the task of reaping the harvest. We reap by giving testimony as the woman did and give people an opportunity to see God save sinners the same way He saved you and me, through faith in Christ Jesus.


-- The original message derived from the pulpit of the Hopewell Baptist Church in Anderson, SC. Our morning worship service is at 11 AM every Sunday. Please visit us at www.hbc1803.org for more details.

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