Day 2140 – The Gospel of John – 8 – Water for a Thirsty Woman – Daily Wisdom

Welcome to Day 2140 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom The Gospel of John – 8 – Water for a Thirsty Woman – Daily Wisdom Putnam Church Message – 03/13/2022 The Gospel of John – Part 2 Presentation Of The Word – Water for a Thirsty Woman Today we continue our Good News series according to John the Apostle. Today we will learn that Jesus is concerned for and loves those rejected by others.  The passage for today is a rather long one, John 4:1-26, which is located on Pages 1651-1652 in the Pew Bible. Instead of reading it all upfront, I have embedded the scripture in today’s message.   Once John the Baptizer announced Jesus as the Messiah, the Lord wasted no time calling disciples. Within forty-eight hours, five hand-selected students had begun training for the transformation of the world. They had seen Jesus perform miracles (2:1–12), they had experienced His passionate desire for revival (2:13–25), and they had heard Him preach and teach (3:1–36). The time had come for them to glimpse their future as evangelists. Jesus, the Jewish reformer, would become Jesus the missionary and show His students how to reach the world outside of Judaism. Between Galilee to the north and Judea to the south, a lost and forsaken people lived in a spiritual no-man’s-land called Samaria, and they needed to hear the good news. (Bulletin Insert)   Jews traveling between Judea and Galilee usually avoided Samaria, a land they considered defiled by Gentile intermarriage and religious syncretism. Rather than walk on impure soil, they descended the mountains surrounding Jerusalem to the Jordan Plain, journeyed along the eastern shore of the Jordan River, and then turned west into Galilee. Jesus, however, chose a direct route from Jerusalem to Cana, which took Him through the Samaritan town of Sychar.  (Bulletin Insert) —4:1–3— Tracing Jesus’ movements in the Gospel of John is not as helpful as in Luke, which provides more geographical information. However, the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) don’t tell us nearly as much about the Lord’s ministry in Judea. We learn from John that Jesus frequently traveled between Galilee and Judea, and His reasons for moving from one region to the other varied significantly. Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— 2 although, in fact, it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. 3 So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.  In this case, He sensed that His ministry in Judea was attracting attention for the wrong reasons. While truth will always stir controversy, Jesus was not interested in squaring off with the Pharisees—at least not yet, not until it served His ultimate purpose (15:22–25). —4:4— Now he had to go through Samaria. The phrase “had to” is translated from a Greek verb meaning “to be necessary.” Anyone unfamiliar with Samaria’s history who might be looking at a map would not see anything peculiar about John’s word choice. Draw a straight line from Jerusalem to Cana (4:46), account for the hilly terrain, and a stopover in Sychar appears perfectly reasonable. However, John’s choice of words would have been provocative to any Jewish reader. Jews despised Samaritans. To the Jews, Samaritans were idolatrous half-breeds—ethnically polluted, religiously...