Tag Archives: worth

The Woman at the Well

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In focus. Rightly seeing God & How he sees us. Vision matters. 

As we look at each person this year, we are going to ask two questions: 

  1. How did they see God? 
  2. How does God see us? 

In this post we are going to look at someone who only appears in scripture once. The Samaritan women at the well in John 4. John chapter 4 is one of my favorite chapters in scripture. There are so many deep profound truths given to us from Jesus about spiritual food, what fills us up, examples on what following God and not man looks like, how to love people the world does not. Jesus refocuses our vision to see things like God sees things. Not just things, but people, and worship. I hope tonight your vision is changed on some things. 

John 4:3-4 “He left Judea and departed again for Galilee. And he HAD to pass through Samaria.” 

The truth is Jesus did not have to do anything. He wanted to go through Samaria. But in many ways, to help us and the Jews of that time, he did have to go through Samaria. For this to make sense, you have to understand that Jews did not talk to Samaritans. They literally avoided them. They were half Jewish people. If you were Jewish and you were going to travel north you would cross the Jordan river, go north past Samaria, and then cross again to get back over. You did not go through Samaria. But Jesus had too. His attitude should be ours. We may avoid places, or people who live in certain places because it is not comfortable for us but Jesus does the opposite. He brings his disciples with him. They leave him there by the well and go into the city to buy food. 

John 4:5 So He came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Since Jacob’s well was there, Jesus, weary from His journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. 

Many things happen in scripture near a well. Last time we talked about Moses sitting down near a well after leaving Egypt and wondering how God saw him and what he was worth. The woman he is about to meet at this well is probably wondering the same thing. What is she worth to God? How does God see her? We are going to find out how she sees God. 

It says it is the sixth hour. That is about noon. Jesus is tired. This is a long hard trip. But I want you see how unusual this situation is. In order to understand the hatred between Jews and Samaritans and how unprecedented this encounter is, we need to go back for a minute to 722 BC or 2 Kings 17:3-6, to the destruction of Samaria by the Assyrians. Many Israelites were moved out of the area, but the ones who stayed eventually married these foreigners and their descendants “lost their Israelite identity.” They also brought with them “their own concept of worship. Although they eventually adopted the God of Israel, their worship was never a pure worship.” (Truth for Today Commentary, John 1-12, Lipe, pg 173) Eventually the Jews returned from Exile and began rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans offer to help rebuild but the Jews reject their help. (Ezra 4) So the Samaritans build a temple on Mt Gerizim, the mountain that Jesus is sitting near at the well. But that temple was destroyed by a Jewish general around 128 BC. But they kept worshiping on this mountain even after their temple was destroyed. This is the history they are sitting in to have this conversation. Jesus has come to bury thousands of years of hatred between Jews and Samaritans and show them regardless of how they see each other, God sees them very differently. 

Maybe there are people you have had a hard history with and you avoid them or think it can never be repaired. But if this encounter Jesus has, on purpose, shows us anything it is that God desires us to be reconciled with each other. He wants peace. He died to create peace on the cross. He wants us to go out of our way like he did to show people how much we care. He needs us to see people with the same worth that he sees us. 

7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 “You are a Jew,” said the woman. “How can You ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered, “If you knew the gift of God and who is asking you for a drink, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” 11“Sir,” the woman replied, “You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where then will You get this living water? 

There are so many shocking things happening here. First, Jesus talks to her in public.  Jewish men didn’t talk to their own wives in public durning those days. They certainly didn’t talk to Samaritan women. She even points that out. You are a Jew. Second, what he asks of her is unheard of. He asks for a drink. She tells him you don’t have anything to drink out of. That means, Jesus would have to share a cup with a Samaritan. In those days, Jews did not even use the dishes that Samaritans had used. They were unclean. Even if this was a man, this act to the Jews would have made him unclean they though. Here is God, willing to be seen as unclean to show someone he made that they were not. 

Jesus talks about the gift of God. When she heard that perhaps she thought they were were not worthy of a gift from God. They shared a belief in God but it was the Jews who were the chosen people. That made a difference in how they saw God. Maybe where she was in her life, having had 5 husbands, she had never seen gifts from God. Maybe some of those husbands had died and she had to married a brother. We don’t know. We do know that even in the Samaritan town she lived in being married 5 times was probably put her at the bottom of their own society. Now she believed she was talking to a prophet; one connected directly to God. 

Jesus talks about being this living water and really what he is revealing to her is his true identity. She saw God as something distance. The Samaritans believed that a prophet like Moses was coming, the Taheb, the Restorer but was not yet there. Jesus brings her understand to a new place. He reveals to her that he is the one they are waiting for. Outside of his disciples, he had never revealed that to anyone else. Further, their thirst is able to be more than satisfied. He is also able to tell them everything (vs25) which he does staying there another two days. 

When the conversation turns to subject of worship, to her it is all about location. 

John 4:19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I see that You are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where one must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21“Believe Me, woman,” Jesus replied, “a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such as these to worship Him. 24 God is Spirit, and His worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”

Jesus picks her to make the announcement that when it comes to worship, it is not about location, it is about participation. She saw herself as unworthy of God’s presence. And God says I am coming to you to prove that is wrong. She saw herself unworthy to worship maybe even at all, noting that her fathers worshiped on this mountain. Notice she did not include herself. But Jesus did. A time is coming when YOU will worship. It wasn’t the location that makes worship holy. It is the presence of God himself that does that. When we show up to worship, know that God is already there waiting to be worshiped. God’s presence is spirit and truth. It is how he wants to be worshiped. The true worshipper comes into worship led by the spirit of God and is participated in through the truth. We are not told to worship however we want. God does not accept all worship. He cares how it done. He always has. He knows we will make it about us in some ways. God designed it to be about him. This woman gets to hear that and goes on to believe in him and I imagine worship him from a very different perspective. 

What will you do with Jesus’ revelations given here? While we are separated, we may feel like we can’t worship because our place is closed and that is where we worship. But God has never asked for us to set a place, he has asked for us to set our hearts in worship to him. What are you going to do with the knowledge that he is the source of living water? Look to be filled in other places? Jesus is it. He is more than enough. And he wants you to believe that your identity and worth is tied up in his identity and worth. That is something to be devoted to and spend our life in worship towards Him. 

Moses- A Worthy Leader

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Moses- A worthy leader

In focus. Rightly seeing God & How he sees us. Vision matters. 

As we look at each person this year, we are going to ask two questions: 

  1. How did they see God? 
  2. How does God see us? 

Moses is a familiar figure to us from scripture. He is born into a sad time in the history of God’s people. After the account of Joseph, who saved Egypt, but now they had forgotten about that time, and have put the Israelites in slavery. They had removed their freedom. What would this do to your self-esteem? To your self-worth? You would feel worthless. You would probably pass this understanding of worthlessness on to your children. 

Exodus 1:12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. 13 So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves 14 and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves. 

What would your view of God be? The God who promised your ancestors to make you a great nation. Would you think your God valued you at all? Maybe they thought to themselves, if God cared about us, if he thought we were worth so much to Him, why do I wake up as a slave every day? Why doesn’t he rescue me? Do you feel that way? Do you feel worthless? Do you feel like God cares about you or has forgotten about you? If He did why do I wake up still a slave to sin? Why can’t I get out of this cycle? Why doesn’t God rescue me? And that is how we see God. But in reality God is doing things we do not see. We need to adjust our vision. 

God was doing something in Moses’s day, that they did not see. In the end of chapter 1, we find the Hebrew midwifes, the ladies who delivered the babies for Israel, stilled feared God. And they ignore the instructions to kill all the boys. They saw God differently. The knew he was able to save them even if the most powerful man in the world told them something differently. 

Exodus 1:21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. 22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”

God gives blessing to Israel because of a few people who saw him the right way. Do not underestimate living as a person who rightly sees God and the effect what that means to God. 

Moses is born into this, saved by his sister in a baskets and grows up in the house of Pharaoh after being adopted by Pharaoh’s wife. 

Exodus 2:11 One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. 12 He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together. And he said to the man in the wrong, “Why do you strike your companion?” 14 He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” 15 When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.

Somewhere along Moses’s upbringing he is either taught or learns about his Hebrew heritage. And as a grown man, he kills an Egyptian, runs aways from everything he knew. And he sits down by a well wondering what the rest of his life would bring. Do you think that he questioned if he was worthy or not? I am sure he questioned if God cared about him? The Egyptians sure didn’t care about him. I am sure Moses had to endure being told he was not worthy growing up, he was not a real son of Pharaoh, not a real Egyptian. He even got it from the Hebrews. Who do you think you are? The reality was, I don’t think he knew. So here he sits. Not sure how he sees God, and certainly not sure how God saw him.

He meets the daughters of the priest of Midian, goes home with them, marries one of them and picks up their family trade; becoming a shepherd. He was happy. Maybe he began to enjoy what he was doing, but I do not think he had answered the question of how God saw him?  But God was about to clear that up for him.

Exodus 2:23 During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. 24 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. 25 God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.

God knew. He already knew what He was going to do to help them. Keep reading. 

Exodus 3:1 Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. 3 And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” 4 When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. 7 Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?”

God lays out his whole plan to Moses. He opens his eyes to see things how God is looking at the situation. It is like God putting his arm around him and saying, “Look Moses, here is what we are going to do. I will send you.” But Moses didn’t see it like God did, in fact, he informs God how he sees himself, “Who am I?” I am not worthy to do what you are saying. Then he is going to go on to tell God, he is not capable of doing what God is asking him to go do. 

God’s anger burns at his view of himself, at all his excuses, and he says, enough. I am sending you with my mighty hand. Aaron will speak for you. You will be like god to Him. Moses finally agreed and went to meet Aaron. 

Exodus 4:28 And Moses told Aaron all the words of the Lord with which he had sent him to speak, and all the signs that he had commanded him to do. 29 Then Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the people of Israel. 30 Aaron spoke all the words that the Lord had spoken to Moses and did the signs in the sight of the people. 31 And the people believed; and when they heard that the Lord had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed their heads and worshiped.

Do you think that in the moment Moses began to see God differently? The people believed him. What changed? Moses submitted to God. He allowed God to open his eyes. He began to see that maybe he was a capable leader like God said he would be. He goes on to lead the people out of Egypt, become the leader of a million people. He is the spiritual leader who gives them the law. He is the judge over all the people. He becomes one of the largest figures in the history of the Christian world besides Jesus. A man who sat at a well wondering how God saw him. 

What would Moses tell you if you are sitting here doubting your self worth, or your ability to be a leader? Trust God. Be careful to do all that he commands you to do. See him the right way. Know that how he sees you is much different than how we see ourselves. Get up from the well you may find yourself setting at and trust God.