This is the 11th message in a series on Jesus’ encounter with the woman at Jacob’s well described in John 4. Thank you for the heartfelt responses.

Dear Friends:

The question comes to us in different ways and times, but sooner or later it comes to us all — Is Jesus Christ “the way, the truth and the life” — the means and the end of God for us (John 14:6)? There is no evading the question, but be warned — an affirmative answer to that question will reduce to rubble everything we thought we knew and hold dear in cherished traditions.

Jesus does not conserve or preserve. He changes everything.

This is what the Samaritan woman is beginning to understand. She comes to the well in the middle of the day to avoid the crowd. Jesus is there and ignores the prejudicial human barriers of gender, race and religion to talk to her.

She raises practical objections to his invitation to drink his “living water.” Jesus ignores her objections and renews his offer.

She appeals to history–“Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob?”– and his reply is in effect, “History hasn’t prepared you for what I have for you.”

She tells him, “I have no husband,” but he reveals that she has no secrets that he does not know.

The woman knows something about the convenient cover of religious talk. She’s spent time in the company of “spiritual” men. She is a good listener and perhaps they liked to think they were making an “honest” woman out of her. She wonders if that is Jesus’ angle? She tries to change the subject with some flattery and religious banter.

“Sir, you’re a prophet I see. Our Samaritan ancestors worshiped on this very mountain, but you Jews say the only legitimate place to worship is Jerusalem.” 

But she doesn’t know with whom she is dealing. In Jesus, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12).

Jesus knows her. The woman’s innermost being is laid bare before him. The voice of God out of Eden echoes in the deepest recesses of her heart, “Where are you?” Her instinctual fearful reaction is to hide her naked self behind the “fig-leaf” of religion (Gen 3:8-10). Religious knowledge and practice will never suffice for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (Matt 7:21-23; John 17:3).

Jesus takes us as we are, but he does not leave us that way. When the Lord Jesus comes to dwell in a human heart, he strips it bare of its furnishings, even those we have so carefully selected and polished. Jesus does not seek to make us better or to upgrade our virtues and capacities. He seeks to make us over and if we allow him to get a hand on us, he won’t stop until he has his way with us.

We come to Jesus, attracted by his shining grace, hugged close in his accepting embrace, loved as we have never known love. When we say, “Yes,”  we do so with an open and willing heart so far as we know. But then he starts washing us and immerses us in his Living Water. He scrubs us clean of everything that we thought we knew and were certain of in our hearts–layer after tightly-wrapped layer of desire, expectation, opinion, defense, scars, fear, guilt, shame, pretense, and the gunk acquired by merely living.

He doesn’t spare her religious “skin” with his scrubbing. He tells her, “Mount Gerizim or Mount Zion, take your pick, because it doesn’t matter where you worship if you are a ‘true worshiper’ of our heavenly Father. You see, it is who you worship that matters, not your place of worship. You Samaritans don’t have Scripture to back up your worship, but we Jews worship what we know to be true from Scripture because ‘salvation is from the Jews’.” He is explaining the covenant relationship between God and the children of Israel from which the Samaritans have wandered away in apostasy (Gen 12:3). More to the point, he is referring to the promise of a Messiah in the line of David (1 Chron 17:13-14). 

He continues, “The hour has arrived when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for that’s the kind of worshiper that the Father is seeking.” Then he makes a deeper point, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

The spirit of which Jesus speaks, is “breath,” the essential element that brings flesh to life, a gift of God from the moment of the creation of humanity (Gen 2:7; Ecc 12:7). Breathing is even more basic than water since hydration is necessary to carry oxygen throughout the body. Without water the body convulsively gasps for the oxygen that it is denied. Jesus is telling the woman that true worship places the focus of our entire selves on the Father as the source of our lives. “As I live and breathe. . .” is an old exclamation to underscore a truth communicated–“As I live and breathe, I am telling you that it was really him.”

We owe our breath, the very essence of our life, to God and our proper gratitude is praise. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!” (Ps 150:6). It is God’s very breath, the Holy Spirit, that brings us to worship. The Spirit “helps us in our weakness” and connects us to the will of God (Rom 8:26-27). The Spirit teaches us the words of Christ as our living reality (John 14:26). The Holy Spirit is the channel by which God’s love is poured into our hearts (Rom 5:5). By the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was resurrected to life, and by that same power of the “Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” we are “set free from the law of sin and death” (Rom 1:4a; 8.2).

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” said Jesus (Matt 5:3). A literal translation of that saying is “The people who have a legitimate claim on the kingdom of heaven are those who know that they are beggars, dependent on God for their very breath. That humiliation is the root of true worship and the starting point of real prayer. “Seek the Lord and his strength, seek his presence continually,” David prayed when he brought the Ark of the Covenant into the center of Jerusalem for the worship of God (1 Chron 16:11).

Of course there is no magic in just possessing the artifact of the Ark. Without the presence of God it is just an elaborate box reminding Israel to praise the God of the covenant.

Of course there is no inherent spiritual power in a mountaintop experience or in the bricks and mortar of our houses of worship no matter how beautiful they may be.

Praise and worship are not ends in themselves. If we praise the praise and worship the worship or insist on the holiness of places and objects, we are idolaters.

True worship seeks God for himself alone. Worship does not wheedle and bargain with God for his benefits for that is “gold-digging” behavior. It does not seek perfection in our performance for that is to remove our eyes from the Lord. Our holy God lives in the praises of his people (Ps 22:3). We crave his life as our living reality. The simple principle that we live with the Lord or die without him is graphically described in David’s prayer of Psalm 63.
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The woman came out for a drink of water with an existence that was sterile and empty. At the well, the Son of God speaks to her with guileless honesty, gradually revealing to her who he is. She begins to realize that she is really thirsty for the Living Water and fainting for lack of the breath of God in the corpuscles of her soul.

Instead of a mere drink of water that she can draw by her effort, contain in her own jar, and drink or not in her own choosing and timing, everything that she thought she knew about God and worship is being swept away in a gushing flood of grace. Panicked by the loss of control, she clambers up the walls of her religious certainties in an attempt to regain her footing, catch her  breath, and escape the current carrying away all of her carefully-filled sandbags of defenses. Now she finds out that she can’t even breathe on her own. And she is learning the life that Jesus is offering her is entirely dependent on God breathing for her.

Jesus is revealing the Father’s intentions toward her. He will not leave her alone until there is nothing left of her at all. He is washing away everything that constitutes her old life. This is the devastation of the cross taking all we are and giving it to God as a living sacrifice–this is the worship that’s acceptable to God (Rom 12:1). “Nothing in my hand I bring, only to Thy cross I cling,” is the way the old hymn puts it.

The Apostle Paul described this worship to the Colossians: “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (Col 3:1-4).

These are hard truths and tough love to be sure. We grab hold of rocks and twigs to resist  being swept away. We take refuge in points of doctrine and spiritual interpretations most pleasing to us. Jesus does not humor us in our self- protection no matter how strong our felt needs or pious our attitudes. “The time is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.”

All along you and I thought we were seeking him in places and times of our choosing, and now we find out he is seeking us with a simple “yes” or “no” question: “Do you worship me or don’t you?”

What is your answer to him?

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps. 34:8)

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.