Earlier this week, I was really excited because a good friend of mine got a new grill And I was I even called him. Hey, you pick this thing up yet now I got I got a feel it in he got the same kind of girl I have so there's a little reason why but I was laughing at it And then I realized I think it's come men. I need your help here It's completely appropriate to be excited for your friend when they get a new grill, right? We laugh about that But no friends matter for other reasons than this you know good friends matter because we know they're always gonna be with us They can help us out good friends matter because there's only can talk to but one of the things that friends do especially good friends is that good friends Can also have those tough conversations with us And there's times where somebody needs to tell us something that we need to hear and you think about who you want to hear that sort of thing from you You don't want to hear that from a stranger you want to hear that from somebody you trust You want to also hear that from somebody who you know is gonna be alongside of you is there Don't having this tough conversation with you these next few weeks were in a series that we're calling good talk bro It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek idea of this But these are encounters that people had with Jesus to where tough conversations are happening and we're gonna have three of them This Sunday we're talking about when they don't know who Jesus is Well next Sunday we're gonna talk about when you hope you know who Jesus is and in the last Sunday We're gonna talk about when you should know who Jesus is and it's three different levels of relationships that people have with him We kind of put ourselves in this question over the series.
So what happens when we let Jesus get to the bottom of our mess Our answer to that is that he invites us to truly live and we're gonna talk a lot about about truth today And we're gonna kind of answer that question so when you don't know who Jesus is But we're also talking about what does it mean for truth to only have one maker for truth to be coming from one direction in our life And so John's story if him and the woman at the well we find this in John's chapter four as the story Many people know our women's our medium-sized group our women's ministry the well takes its name from this passage of this encounter And before we go into this I want to say this I want to ask you to you know scripture I've said this before scripture is not like an onion sounds really weird Like chat on onions don't tell me don't don't make that I don't okay, but like there's layers to it and there's some stories more than others and this story is one of those moors So where there's a lot of layers to this story and we don't have the time today to go into all of those layers We're gonna kind of just take on one of those layers because there's a lot of things that are important that we could be talking about in this We're just gonna really kind of look at truth and how this encounter speaks to truth And so this is what I want you to do is I read this or if you're reading your Bible yourself or you can go into my Foundry dot life in the message notes description there in front of you as we read this I want you to look for a couple things I want you to look for how Jesus is confronting this person how they're behaving in this confrontation But also want you to look and think about what is it how is Jesus leading them step by step in this discussion? And I want you to look at how truth Works out inside of this so I read this and she read this I was just think about those things so John chapter four We're gonna start in verse nine Jesus and his disciples to come up this well the disciples go into town to buy some food and Jesus stays there At the well and it's about noon it's about 12 o'clock So the woman was surprised for Jews refused to have anything to do with Samaritans and she said to Jesus You're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman Why are you asking me for a drink and Jesus replied if you only knew the gift God has for you and who you're speaking to you You would ask me and I would give you a living water But sir you don't have a rope or a bucket she said and this well is very deep Where would you get this living water and besides you think you're greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us this well How can you offer better water than he and his sons and his animals enjoyed Jesus replied anyone who drinks this Water will soon become thirsty again, but those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again It becomes a fresh bubbling spring within them and gives them eternal life Please serve the woman said giving this water and I'll never be thirsty again I won't have to come here to get water go and get your husband Jesus told her I don't have a husband a woman replied and Jesus said you're right You don't have a husband free of five husbands and you aren't even married to the man you're living with now You've certainly spoke the truth Sir the woman said you must be a prophet so tell me why is it that you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place of worship While we Samaritans claim it's here at Mount Gerazim where our ancestors worship Jesus replied believe me dear woman the time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem You Samaritans know very little about the one you worship while we Jews know all about him for salvation comes through the Jews But the time is coming indeed It's now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth the Father's looking for those who worship him in that way for God is spirit so those who worship him most worship in spirit and truth the woman said I know the Messiah is coming the one who's called the Christ and when he comes he will explain everything to us and Jesus told her I am that Messiah So when you don't know you don't know him This woman's a Samaritan and it's a Maritans there's a complicated group of people but they live in the north part of the Holy Land and Traditionally what we see is that when the kingdoms are split into and the northern kingdom was exiled the way that exile works back Then is you take all the rich people and all the business owners and all the smart people and you would leave everyone else left There and it's effectively just conquering kingdom would come in and we decide okay, you're worth it and you're worthless We're gonna leave all the worthless people here and then what they would typically do is they would move worthless people from other parts The world they had conquered into that worthless person's territory These are all the folks they felt like you know the story by Daniel and the lions den were familiar with that like Daniel was was deemed Worthful so they would take him out they put and so what they did is the Jewish people after time after hundreds of years They really see the Samaritans as half breeds like they're very judgmental and the Samaritans and their attempts to try to figure stuff out This Mount Derry's team they're talking about is not something they made up It's actually the first place hundreds of years before this story I took place or the first place the tabernacle was when the Israelites came over from out of the wilderness So they actually have a reason to say that But this has been this big huge arguing piece and by the time they've been arguing about this stuff for almost a thousand years It's gotten to the point where they just don't like each other And they could tell who each other is they sound different and this whole first bit is the fact that Jesus should not be talking to A summation woman could a good because a good Jewish man would not be talking to a Samaritan woman That's the kind of the question that's going on here and she doesn't see Jesus at first He's just this random guy having this weird conversation with me in a situation that a Jewish person would actually say He's probably making a pass at her because for a man to talk to a woman in private was not something that was Acceptable whatsoever all especially for a Jewish man to be caught talking to a Samaritan woman So she's trying to figure out at first who even is this guy and why is he talking to me? The conversation gets really deep really quick if you can infer but she also doesn't see what he's offering He's talking about living water and this is a biblical metaphor for the provision that God offers That's a curse because constantly throughout the book of Psalms and the Old Testament She doesn't see what he's she's offering in fact She kind of takes him a very literal very face level. She doesn't understand the dimension of her need She's like well, where's this water?
Can you get because I'm tired of hauling this water here every day? Like it's a very kind of at a face value. She's taking what he is saying here The next thing that we see in here is that is this conversation progresses? I guess the point of where she doesn't know what she's talking about She begins deflecting off of what Jesus says and think about this Let's be honest whenever we've been in a conversation with someone we're probably being confronted with something We don't want to hear about ourselves.
We try to deflect right and then hurt the flexion She's trying to make things even more complicated like she's she realizes this person is seeing into who she is And so she tries to take the conversation completely elsewhere. We'll talk about that in a second She's in this place. She's having this conversation with this person She realizes that he's somebody different so in order to deflect the fact that he's getting a little bit too close to her emotional state And to what she's going through in life. She brings up.
She's like, I'm worried I'm uncomfortable So let me get into this seriously complicated religious discussion with this person who I've just met who I'm pretty sure is smarter than me Like that sounds like deflection to me Like she's trying to change the subject as quickly as possible And first that sounds kind of weird But I think there's a reason that she's doing it. We'll get to that But she also calls Jesus a prophet She says I see that you're a prophet in scripture We realize that prophecy is not about future telling that prophecy is about truth telling she begins to realize that Jesus is able to speak truth into her life It's conversation is growing and step by step by step away See true truth has no agenda and we live in a world now where truth is a very complicated thing, right? We almost like day we have to figure is this the truth or is this not the truth like there's literally a button I see now on Facebook You can click on something that tells you like the place where this is coming from is seen as truthful or seen as untruthful Like we've gotten to the point to where I can remember a day when it was on the internet It was right automatically and now it's like on the internet. It's not right.
There's no way that's true But true truth has no agenda It's possibly why she's realizing is that Jesus God He's speaking into me because he seems to not have an agenda His only agenda is the fact that for some odd reason he deeply cares about me It's a story of truth is growing truth only has one maker So what's the purpose of this conversation like we step back and look at this What's the purpose of this? Do we believe Jesus is trying to confront her morality or do we think Jesus is Trying to reframe who she thinks she is This last kind of movement we go to in this conversation is when we don't know ourselves That's what Jesus is kind of saying. I don't even know if you know yourself or not. No, let's talk about core identity I realize this slide is probably a little bit too small for us to see But let's just talk about our core identity because our core identity works in two ways It's our corporate identity so who we are as a group of people where our place is in that But also our personal identity.
How do we see our how do we see ourselves and how do we feel value? Let's talk about her corporate identity. She instantly brings up this whole worship issue into a Samaritan That's their biggest difference between them and the Jewish people But we also see this woman has some odd behaviors if we bring up this this whole thing about the husbands that Jesus brought in We realized they know still to this day in the middle east when there's there's no place people have to go draw water every day Nobody in the right mind goes to draw water in high noon. It's the hottest part of the day Is anybody here want to like do like ultra hard like manual labor at the hottest part of the day?
There's a reason why this woman is going to this whale at noon So she's probably trying to avoid the other people that she's with Jesus brings in this whole morality piece And what scripture tells us you never tells us how she got into the situation There's multiple ways that she could have gotten the situation she could be a widow a couple of times over She could be divorced and in scripture I'll say this before this is a tiny bit of an exaggeration but not too much But like the way Jewish will all worked and the Samaritans were kind of half Jews They kind of kept some of this stuff If you weren't happy with your dinner that night you could divorce your wife Like for a Jewish man if he had any sense of unhappiness you're gone you're out of fear We don't know what could have led to the point where this woman Has had this many husbands We have no earthly idea and what Jesus says is the man you're living with now is not even your husband He's he's not poking at her morality Well, he's poking about the fact is you've gotten into a situation somehow to where you've been devalued so much by your village by your society That you're not even seen as worthy as of making a legal wife And he's not accusing her of something but he's speaking into the truth of that You know the last thing probably the only thing this woman has still that could identify her as a Samaritan Is this religious belief and she's bringing it up not to try to like argue with Jesus or try to get in some fibers like this is the last piece of identity that I have left She's clinging to this just just tiny semblance of who she is And then there's her personal identity, but I think of the shame that must exist here Like when you literally go do this task to completely avoid every other person you might see Now this is the kind of thing that we might do in elementary school But as an adult to have this level of shame that you want to avoid interactions with every other person Both this woman's corporate identity of who she is And her personal identity her own personal sense of worth have just been completely annihilated If there was a ladder in her village, she's on the bottom rung of it And Jesus is just speaking. I know the truth of what you have gone through in your life I'm speaking that into the middle of this conversation that we are having right now I realize that people are in absolution or people are in conflict with you There's truth to what you're experiencing right now. If you've ever gone through a really tough time Think of how powerful it is when somebody just simply agrees with you and they say yeah, this is bad Like sometimes you just want to find somebody to agree with you This is probably the first time anyone's ever spoken the truth into this woman's existence in her life Yeah, things are really bad for you right now What Jesus asked her to do and invites her into is very different because Jesus is answering this identity problem that she has By transcending her. I understanding of knowing of what does it mean to be known and what does it mean to know someone else He's telling her that you are more than a product of your past circumstances To everyone around her all she is is a history of her past It's all that matters to her and Jesus is the person who's not seeing her as a product of her past Speaks about the truth of worship and spirit and truth and all of us are called to worship God in this way The holy God the transcendent God the truth of who he is and we worship him and the truth of who he is Because he's revealed to us the truth of who we are And is asked to come inside and redeem us and transform us into that truth the truth of who he made us to be Jesus leading her step by step Into a new understanding of herself This phrase spirit and truth is used a couple of different times to understand this but it's up to us to realize that the incomprehensible the Unwimited God the God who's bigger than everything I'm going to keep you seeing that song.
He's got the whole world in his hands that that God Personally knows us and not only does that God personally know us that that God has invited us to personally know him That Jesus gives us intimate knowledge and gives us the ability to interact and to know this God to worship him in spirit and truth That God big enough for all this world tells us the truth of who he is And Jesus is seeking people that realize God knows them better than they know themselves And when we know God we begin to know ourselves truthfully for the first time These are people that are willing to drop the pretenses that they are in charge Instead of how God to be in charge we realize that their self knowledge that only comes to our relationship with this God The truth only has one maker and I read just a little bit of a follow-up to what this woman does So the disciples come back they're blown away to circumstance I can't believe Jesus with her and she goes back to her village This is what she says is verse 29 come and see a man who told me everything I ever did Could this possibly be the Messiah now think about that? That's just kind of that that's an odd Situation right there. No, we normally act that way if someone like told us the truth of everyone we are Imagine a lot of times that situation we like to kind of hide that a little bit We're like, yeah, don't tell anybody else that Instead she runs to town to the place where she's had to live in shame for we don't know how long And the first thing she says is hey come and see this person who told me everything I ever did All the things you've been wondering about that you might have been talking about behind my back of these rumors or whatever Because remember we talked about this a lot before like in this world view if bad stuff happens to you that means you've done bad things All the rumors have been swirling around about her for ages She's now inviting people come and see this man who told me everything I ever did and we find out in the story She's actually spent a few days in this village This woman serves as an evangelist and a missionary as Jesus presents himself to the Samaritan people But just think about that situation In order for us to be willing to say that the truth of who we are had to actually have the ability to transform who we are Like a lot of times we don't want to know the truth about ourselves But it said Jesus came and told this woman that Everything changed So just a few questions for us to ask ourselves this week and you can find these On the message and notes section at my family. Life and those are on there for us to think about them throughout the week But just a few questions for us to think about First one is this and what ways are we still defending ourselves in front of Jesus when all he wants to do is defend you How are we still trying to justify things when he said hey listen, I don't care about that What I've come here to do is to put you in places where you don't belong and defend you in front of accusers To defend you in front of other people.
How are we still doing that? The second question is this what core identity is Jesus wanting to challenge you on? What are some things that you might be holding that are corporate or they're self-imposed? What are some things that people told you when you were younger that you still held on to and if negatively formed who you are?
Or what are some things you told yourself? Jesus wants to fix those things for you. And the last question is how is Jesus inviting us into a greater idea of spirit and truth? A greater understanding of who he is so that we can do what he made us to do What do we do when we don't know him?
We realize the truth comes from him because truth only has one maker And so we come together today to celebrate this to celebrate the reality and the truthfulness of the presence of God with communion We do this frequently because we need to be reminded of this frequently And so the night in which Jesus gave himself up for us He took bread and he gave thanks to God for it and he broke it And he gave it to his disciples and said as often as you eat of this Do this in remembrance of me And he took the cup and he gave thanks to God for it and he gave it to his disciples and said as often as you drink of this Do it in remembrance of me This is my blood the blood of the new covenant we poured out for your sins and for the sins of many Let's pray together today. Holy Father Pour out your presence on us gathered here on these guests of bread and juice make them be for us the body and blood of Christ so that we may be for the world Your body redeemed by your blood by your spirit and make us one with each other in one ministry to all the world Until you come and final victory and we feast together We pray amen In just a few moments we're gonna take communion together a couple of logistical points The kids rationed to come first and they're gonna take first and then we were gonna come as adults and stand up We take by intention That's a fancy word for you pull off a piece of bread You dip it and eat it right then and there you don't have to wait for me to tell you to do this You come down to center aisle. There'll be two stations right here and you can filter back to your seats this way This table doesn't belong to foundry. This table doesn't belong to the nine-month's church This table belongs to everyone who seeks the presence of Christ because everybody can change them no matter what So invite our communion servers to come forward And begin preparing our hearts to encounter Jesus in this way