Unexpected Messengers: The Samaritan Woman and God's Call

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If you're in the Sydney area, be sure to join us at the Heights Church at Galston

Road, Hornsby Heights, Sydney, Australia.

Good morning. We're reading this morning from John chapter 4, starting at verse 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar,

near the the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.

Jacob's well was there, as Jesus, tired as he was from the journey,

sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, Will you give me a drink?

Jesus answered, Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,

but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.

Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water,

welling up to eternal life.

The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water, so that I won't get thirsty

and have to keep coming here to draw water.

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.

Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where

we must worship is in Jerusalem.

Jesus declared, Believe me, woman, 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.

Yet a time is coming, and has now come, when the true worshippers will worship

the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.

God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.

The woman said, I know that Messiah, called Christ, is coming.

When he comes, he will explain everything to us.

Then Jesus declared, I who speak to you am he.

Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman.

But no one asked, What do you want? Or why are you talking with her?

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 Christ?

They came out of the town and made their way towards him.

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.

He told me everything I ever did.

So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days.

And because of his words, many more became believers. believers,

they said to 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 saviour of the world.

And so I'm just going to pray as Chris comes up and opens up God's word.

Lord, I thank you for your word. I thank you that you've given your word to

us so that we can have life.

We can know you. We can grow in you and we can show you to each other in our world.

And that's by and large what this woman has done.

And what we'll hear about this morning is you really knew her and she wants

to know you. wants to grow in that depth and go back and tell other people in the world.

So I pray, Lord, that as we listen to you, as Chris unpacks that for us,

that we would hear you speak and that we would have clear action from your spirit,

about how we are to go out into this world.

I just pray in your name. Amen.

Good morning, everybody.

You believe the three and a half years that I have been at the Heights Church.

This is the third sermon that I am preaching on John chapter four.

I've been led back for whatever reason to this passage about the Samaritan woman.

And let me tell you, very tempted to just go easy, copy the old one. No one will remember.

Paste it today and just do it like it's new.

Yet, because I'm sure that all of you remember all my sermons off by heart,

I wouldn't do that to you.

But more than that, God has led me to see again an angle on this passage that

I think for us this morning will be motivating and encouraging for many of us.

I want to speak this morning about how God's power works through unexpected

people, how God's power works through unexpected messengers.

Well, one such messenger in the early 1930s was a young woman named Gladys Allwood.

And she felt a burning desire to serve as a missionary in China.

By all outward appearances, she may have seemed utterly unqualified for such a calling.

Standing at just under five feet tall, with no formal education,

and working as a housemaid in London, Gladys hardly fit the profile at the time

of a typical missionary candidate. it.

When she applied at age 26 to the China Inland Mission, she was rejected.

They told her to think about maybe do something else. Maybe the Lord will use you for other things.

But she was determined, yet still the mission board deemed her,

you're too old, you're too uneducated, you're probably not going to be able

to even learn Chinese, go and find something else to do.

But Gladys wasn't going to be deterred.

Believing firmly in her heart that God had called her to China,

she took matters into her own hands.

She thought, I don't need a missionary board to tell me if I can or can't go. I'm going.

And so she did. She saved every penny from her meager wages,

and she eventually purchased enough train tickets to get her first of all to

Siberia and then finally to go on the treacherous journey from Siberia to China.

And she arrived with just two pounds in her pockets, but an unwavering faith.

And she embarked on a perilous month-long trip through war-torn China in 1932,

arriving to join an elderly missionary named Janine Lawson. And she had her struggles.

It says she did find it hard to learn the language, that she did find it hard to adjust.

But eventually she won the respect and the affection of the people she came

to minister to, and she became known as the virtuous one.

She's famous for, in 1938, leading nearly 100 orphaned children to safety over

the mountains during the Chinese invasion of China.

Gladys' story reminds us what I want to challenge every one of us with this

morning, is that God often chooses the most unexpected individuals to carry out his work.

Her life exemplifies the truth that it's not our qualifications,

it's not our outward appearance, it's not our perfect history or past that matters to God.

What matters to God is whether we are willing to put our hand up and say, yes, I'll go, I'll do it.

About her calling, Gladys said this, I wasn't God's first choice for what I did in China.

I don't know who was first choice.

I'm guessing it was probably a man, probably a well-educated man. Perhaps he died.

Perhaps he wasn't willing. And God looked down and saw me and God said, well, she is willing.

Well, much like Gladys Aylward, the woman we meet in John chapter 4 was an unlikely

John 4 · chapter mention

candidate for spreading the gospel.

Yet in the Gospels, she is one of the first people to go and tell an unreached

community about the message, about the person of Jesus.

God, in his infinite wisdom, chose her for a remarkable purpose.

And so we are reminded, encouraged, I hope perhaps even this morning,

even a little fired it up to remember that God's ways are not our ways,

that God sees potential where others will only see limitations.

And this is what God might be challenging you with in your particular context of your life right now.

Perhaps the question you could be asking yourself is, what are the ways that

I am currently only seeing limitations where God might be wanting to lead me to see potential.

Too often we think this isn't the right moment. I'm not the right person.

It's got to be somebody else. It can't be me because of this.

I can't do that because I need to sort this out first.

Yet God doesn't worry about any of that. He's looking for someone who just says,

I know that my past and my history might not be ideal.

I know that my current situation might not be what I would consider to be a

ministry field, yet God, yes, I'll go.

I think and I hope that maybe one of the reasons why God keeps leading me back

to John chapter 4 is because really, as you read it, it really is one of the

John 4 · chapter mention

most profound encounters recorded in the Gospels.

Because it's not just one person's life who is changed in this story.

Often that's what we focus on, how the Samaritan woman's life is changed.

But the change that occurs in her life ripples out and impacts her entire community.

And as we dig into the story, we notice quite famously, perhaps for some of you,

that the story gives hints that the community that she would later impact profoundly

is a community that she isn't currently the favorite person in that community.

She's meeting at noon, perhaps to avoid other people. We learn later about her

story, her checkered past.

Perhaps when all the other women go to the well earlier in the day,

she doesn't want to be a part of that crowd.

She doesn't want the comments. She knows she won't fit in.

So she goes in the middle of the day. Yet it is at precisely the middle of the

day, and it is precisely this woman who is perhaps a little bit of an outcast

from her community, that Jesus chooses to meet with.

This story is yet another example how God chooses the most unlikely candidates,

even those whom society has cast aside or deemed unworthy, to be his messengers.

I think actually, and you see this throughout Scripture, that God seems to actually

have a preference for the unlikely.

He seems to have a preference to do his work through those whom aren't supposed to be the ones.

We see it in 1 Samuel chapter 16, as the prophet Samuel arrives at Jesse's house

1 Samuel 16 · chapter mention

to anoint the next king of Israel.

Jesse does what most of us do,

which is, okay, on paper, what is the best way for me to approach this?

Well, what he does is he parades his impressive older sons before the prophet,

each one seemingly more qualified than the last to lead the nation.

Yet God, in his infinite wisdom in that story, chooses none of them.

Them instead he selects the

youngest he selects the unlikely one he

selects the shepherd boy who isn't even in the

room the one who wasn't even invited to the ceremony the one who was deemed

too insignificant to even be there and it's there that we read and are reminded

in 1 Samuel 16 verse 7 that the Lord does not look at the things that people

1 Samuel 16:7

look at people look at the outward appearance,

but the Lord looks at the heart.

The Lord does not look at the things people look at.

I read that and I ask myself, why,

even those of us who have heard this scripture or scriptures like this for many, many years,

why are we still continually led to look at the things that people look at,

to look at things in the way that other people look at, when our Lord doesn't look at them like that.

He looks at the heart. He looks at the deeper things that he calls us to also consider.

And so whether it's David's anointing or this encounter with the Samaritan woman.

We can be challenged about the way if they can be used by God in his divine plan.

What are the ways in my life currently, in the context that I'm in, that I might be used?

As you read through John chapter 4, we see like a progression of the Samaritan's

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woman's understanding of Jesus.

She moves from seeing him as a Jewish man, to wondering if he might be greater

than Jacob, the patriarch,

to acknowledging that he might be some sort of prophet, to finally questioning

if this man might indeed actually be the long-awaited Messiah.

That journey that happens in one conversation, that sometimes for us,

that journey can take a lot longer.

For many of us, that might remind you of your story.

Perhaps you began with skepticism. Maybe you began with limited knowledge and

understanding about what all this God stuff is about. out.

But perhaps you also, through genuine encounter and curiosity with Jesus,

have a relationship with him now that leaves you compelled to share your experience with others.

In this transformative encounter, we see God's grace and we see God's redemption,

the same grace and the same redemption that is available to you.

Grace being that undeserved favor of God is demonstrated by Jesus in this story

as he defies societal norms and religious boundaries.

And he offers this Samaritan woman the gift of living water.

This grace freely given without judgment or condemnation is the gospel message,

is the good news of Jesus.

As it says in Ephesians chapter 2, it is by grace you have been saved through

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faith. And this is not from yourselves.

It is a gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.

Perhaps this is the reason why God might have a preference to use the unlikely,

because Because if God used the likely, people would look at that and go,

well, of course they were used. They were likely.

Of course they were used. Look at their resume. Of course they were used.

Look at the family they grew up in. Of course they were used. Look how smart they are.

Look how popular they are. Look how charismatic they are.

And by looking at that and going, well, of course, who gets the glory? It's not God.

God gives us grace, not by our good works, so that no one can boast,

so that fingers can't be pointed at people and going, yeah, look how good they

are, but rather that all glory can be given to the one who deserves it, and that is God.

God doesn't want to use you so that you can all of a sudden get the accolades.

God didn't want to use Gladys so that nearly a hundred years later,

she might be talked about in some random church for a few moments.

That's not what he wants to use you for. He wants to use you so that he can

receive glory, which for me is a little bit freeing. It's not about me.

And so we see also God's redemption unfold in this story because Jesus comes

and in one conversation,

he redeems and releases this woman from her past, a past

that had been a burden, a past that had kept her shackled, the sort of past

that probably when she woke up every morning was the first thing that she thought about.

She might have had a nice dream and escaped from the realities of her life and

woken up and remembered, oh yeah, that's right, I've had all this bad stuff going.

Her cortisol levels probably rose every morning as she was was reminded about all of her flaws.

Yet God consistently, as he did for this woman, he uses flawed individuals and

he uses individuals with flawed stories.

Think about the story of Joseph sold into slavery by his own brothers.

Rahab, a prostitute who became a part of the lineage of Jesus.

Jesus takes this Samaritan woman's broken past and transforms it into a powerful testimony.

Her encounter with Jesus is not only something that changes her trajectory,

as I said, it's something that sparks a new movement of faith within her entire community.

And this is something I'd like all of us to see this morning.

What was the message to her community? Did she come to her community with a

really nicely polished sermon or a comprehensive theological exposition with

all of the answers about God?

No. You can see in the conversation that part of her theology is still a little

bit clunky. And that's okay.

But she still goes. And what does she say? She just keeps it simple.

Example, come see a man who told me everything I did. Could this be the Messiah?

She came with the message. I don't know. I don't have the answers, but come and just see.

And we learn here a profound example about how perhaps we can approach evangelism,

how we can approach the the sharing with others about God and about Jesus that

we would do well to remember in our own efforts to share the gospel.

Sometimes the most powerful testimony, the most powerful sharing about God,

the most powerful message doesn't come with perfect knowledge.

It doesn't come with eloquent speech and it doesn't come from the lips of the

likely, but rather it comes from the the lips of the unlikely,

sharing an authentic, regular story, an encounter with Jesus that just says,

hey, this happened to me, come and see.

And so we should be encouraged. It's not about having all of the right answers

or possessing a flawless understanding of the Bible or theology.

No, it's just about pointing people towards Jesus, creating opportunities for

others through our testimony to encounter him personally.

I wonder in your life what that come and see invitation might look like.

I can't give the example in your life. I can't tell you what that conversation

looks like in your classroom, your workplace, your sphere of influence.

I know that to our youth, I am often encouraging them to take the opportunities

that God presents to them to stand up for a marginalized classmate,

to offer a listening ear to a struggling friend,

to, when asked about what they did on Friday, to not just play it down,

but to be honest and bold.

And to perhaps even go a step further and say, that's what I did on Friday night.

Do you want to come and see next Friday?

I wonder what the version of

come and see could be in your life with the conversations that you have.

And the impact of the Samaritan's version of come and see was profound.

John tells us that many of the Samaritans from the town believed in him because

of the woman's testimony. That is such an incredible half sentence in our scriptures.

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.

In the Samaritan woman, we find a powerful reminder that God doesn't just use

us despite our past experiences.

Experiences that God even sometimes can use our past experiences,

even those experiences that we might view as sources of shame and disqualification.

It's actually often our history of our struggles that we find shame in that

resonates most deeply with others who might be struggling with their own

issues of feeling unequally worthy of God's love and grace.

One of the things we really need to be challenged about is the perceived limitations

that we are constantly placing on ourselves and what God can do in our lives.

Every single one of us here today is guilty of doing that.

Probably every single one of us is guilty of doing that this week,

of thinking, nah, not me. Ah, not today. Ah, not this week. Not this year.

Maybe it's thoughts of inadequacy of like, well, I don't speak well enough.

I don't know enough. I don't have all the answers yet.

My life's too busy, too messy. My past, definitely too messy.

Perhaps it's like, oh, I'm too young. I'm too old. I'm too this. I'm too that.

I haven't done anything yet. I've I've already done everything. I'm finished now.

Time and time again in the scriptures and through history, God delights in using

the unlikely, the unqualified, even the outcast to accomplish his purpose.

We love to make excuses.

Think of Moses who he protested. He said, I don't speak well enough.

Jeremiah who said, well, I'm too young. I'm too young. Send someone else.

Or Paul who was guilty of persecuting the church before forecoming and apostle,

here's something to consider when you think about your current situation of life.

Because often we think, well, ministry is for somebody else. I'm just me.

I'm just doing this stuff. I just do a job.

But we often forget that for the first 30 years of his life,

Jesus wasn't in the spotlight.

Jesus wasn't on a stage. He wasn't preaching to multitudes. He wasn't performing miracles.

In fact, for many of those years, he was a carpenter working with his hands,

living what we might describe as an ordinary life in Nazareth.

Many of us can relate perhaps to Jesus's time as a carpenter.

And look, I'm not saying your next stage of life is Messiah-level ministry.

But we might feel too often that our current circumstances are too mundane for

God to use us, either because, well, this is just me, or either because we feel

like I should be doing more. I need to wait till I'm doing more.

I'm not fulfilling my highest calling right now.

Too often, we feel like I'm wasting time.

I'm My story's already taken a few too many wrong turns for my story to be one that can be used.

Yet there was Jesus for all of his 20s being a carpenter.

And for many people, they would have continued to be a carpenter for the rest of our lives.

And let me tell you something, that would have been fine.

But what we know is that Jesus didn't work as a carpenter thinking,

oh, well, I'm just a carpenter. My father in heaven's never going to use me.

Those years as a carpenter out of the ministry spotlight weren't wasted time.

I'm sure that Jesus was up to some stuff during that time as well,

but it was out of the spotlight.

And much of that time was also preparation. God was at work,

even in what we might describe as the ordinary.

And so just as Jesus spent years doing what he was supposed to be doing,

rather than what he went on to do with his public ministry,

perhaps we as well shouldn't limit what God might be wanting to do in our lives

now, as well as not limiting what God might be preparing us to do in the future.

Something that we might not have even thought of yet.

Your current situation is not ordinary. It's not ordinary.

In fact, there's a very good chance that your current situation is exactly where

God wants you to be. And he wants to use it even now.

He might be preparing you for something else. And you might be thinking,

why would God be preparing me for something by doing this.

I'm not even sure this is what I should be doing. Not even sure this is what

I want to be doing, but it could be the very training ground,

or it could even be the very missionary field that God is wanting to call you to reach.

We see for the Samaritan woman that her transformation within her community

is huge. Nearly the whole community.

As I came back to John chapter four, that was the bit that actually got me.

It made me realize that this is perhaps the most underrated and most overlooked part of this story.

She goes from being an outcast, avoiding public shame, drawing water alone at

midday, to becoming such an influential voice,

that her whole town just about is compelled to come and see Jesus.

And she didn't come with them with all the answers, like I said,

she just came with enthusiasm, with excitement, with that sense of,

I don't care what people think about me, that freedom that comes from being released from that.

Because when we focus on our relationship and encounter with Jesus,

we can be released from that.

Instead of focusing on our anxieties about what others may think of us,

if we, like the Samaritan woman just simply focused on what Jesus might be wanting

to say to us today, we too can implement our own version of come and see.

I found myself considering the lessons of this story, I also reflected upon

my own personal unlikely journey.

I didn't grow up going to church. I grew up in broken, non-Christian homes.

I grew up with a personality that on paper would not have, perhaps you would

have expected, led to me being somebody who does what I do now.

I would have seemed an unlikely candidate to even hear the gospel,

understand the gospel, to find faith, let alone, as what has happened in my

story, someone who would pursue a life of formal ministry.

As I think back to myself as a kid and as a teenager,

I reflected on the fact that nobody, not a single person would have looked at

me and said, yeah, public speaking is something this kid is good at.

Not a single person, not a single person would have said, you know what?

This person's going to be really interested in caring about others.

I'm telling you, not a single person would have had that on the cards for me.

They wouldn't have even, they wouldn't have said that I had the capacity to do it.

And they wouldn't have said I even had the potential to do what I ended up being interested in doing.

Were many assumptions made about how my life would work out.

And I would guess that there are many assumptions about how your life,

the rest of it, is supposed to work out.

In my life, none of those assumptions came even close to what God has done for me and in me.

As I reflect on my story, I'm able to see that God, in his infinite wisdom and

grace, he intervened in my story.

And I don't have the time to go into all the ways that that happened,

but he intervened in my story.

I look at David tending the sheep. And I think in some ways,

that's what my life felt like.

As I consider the Samaritan woman, just wanting to go to the well,

just avoid people, just stay out of drama, just be on my own,

don't have any interactions.

I relate to that experience.

And yet in my life, I found myself called to be an unlikely servant,

just as you are called to be a servant for God's glory.

And when I became a Christian at 16, let me tell you, my theology was extremely clunky, very limited.

Yet I reflect sometimes with shame about how enthusiastic I was.

My enthusiastic for Jesus and his word was just boundless.

I can remember many times coming with what must have seemed almost a little

bit of an unfounded arrogance, just coming to people and just talking to them about Jesus.

Have you heard of Jesus, the gospel, like all this cool stuff that's going on?

My eagerness to share about my experience with Jesus far outpaced my doctrinal Bible knowledge.

And over the years, as my theological education has deepened,

I've been challenged to maintain that initial enthusiasm.

And to not underestimate the way that God will use the enthusiastic over the qualified.

God doesn't call the equipped. Often he equips the called.

And our role, your role, is to remain open, willing, and enthusiastic about

what God wants to say to you, but also about what God wants to do through you.

We must never underestimate the power of simply saying, I'm not perfect.

I don't get it all. I don't have all the answers, but come and see.

It's important as well to acknowledge that not everybody has that journey of one single moment.

Your journey is probably different, and that's okay.

But even if you've had one of those moments, you should be challenged like I'm

challenged to think about, well, how can I meet with Jesus this week?

Why did I go to the well then to meet with him, but I'm not going today.

I'm not going this week. This morning, I challenge you.

I challenge you to reflect upon your journey of faith, but I also challenge

you not just to look to the past, but look to today.

I challenge you to consider the come and see invitations that you could extend

just by going to meet with Jesus today.

May we, as a church, like the Samaritan woman, never cease to be amazed by Jesus.

May we be challenged to continually come to him and to allow him to expose our

deepest needs, to transform us.

God's power in our lives is there and available to you to transform your past,

your doubts, and your current struggles to be effective messages of his boundless love and grace.