The is the twelfth message in a series on Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well recorded in John 4.

Dear Friends:

We live our lives on this earth somewhere between our expectations and reality. This is demonstrated in our conceptions of the physical appearance of Christ.

Our conceptions arise from our questions about why we think we need to be saved and who could save us.

You would think some contemporary would have described his appearance even if based on the accounts of his close companions. But even Luke, a physician trained in anatomy with excellent writing ability and a keen eye for detail never described him.

Truth be told, it doesn’t matter what he looked like. If you are drowning, does it matter if the lifeguard who rescues you is handsome? Does it matter that the surgeon who is going to remove the tumor that is killing you has a scarred and disfigured face?

If Jesus had been described, the temptation of his followers would be to look like the description. Where would that leave those who couldn’t match up? The Word of God says the true hope for Christ depends upon our need, not strength or appearance.

Jesus says that any sick, broken, destitute or imprisoned person–the one that we are least likely to suspect–might be him (Matt 25:37-40). Wherever hearts are broken and spirits are crushed, he is there (Ps 34:18). Wherever the toxic mine-tailings of sin pile up and threaten to bury us, his grace covers us completely (Rom 5:20). He is present in companionship and guidance for confused and grieving travelers on the road home (Luke 24:13-32). He shares meals with sinners and pariahs because they need his mercy (Matt 9:10-13).  He says, “Remember, I am with you always, to the very end of time” (Matt 28:20).

The woman finds a tired, dusty, thirsty young rabbi at the well seeking to distance himself from the expectations and demands of religion (John 4:1-2).  He speaks to her with a kind, insightful honesty she has never encountered before. Something stirs in her soul. Can he be the awaited Messiah? She muses aloud about what she knows about the Messiah.

“I am he,” he tells her. There it is. He quietly announces himself with kindness to her weary, thirsty soul  and apparently she accepts his proclamation as the truth. Their conversation has come to an end because the disciples return from town and break into the conversation at this point.

I have talked with many men and women who are longing for more than they have found in this world. I have spoken to them about their loving Father in heaven and his Son Jesus Christ and prayed with them. In most cases, they have left and given their hearts to Christ on their own. There was no doubting this because of their testimonies and evidences of changed lives.

I used to regret that I didn’t ask them on the spot to accept Christ and mentioned this one day to my friend Joyce. She said, “Kent, you are salt (Matt 5:13). It is your job to make them hungry and thirsty. It is God’s job to feed them.”

Jesus helped the woman to understand she had a thirst for more than the well could satisfy. He spoke to her need in a way that met it and the connection was made.

Meeting people at the place of their need with help relevant to their need is how the good news of the Gospel takes hold. But too often we address our own expectations of what people should want and how they should receive it. We answer questions they aren’t asking and our answers aren’t’ accepted.

A few years ago, I gave a talk on the Cross of Christ and the atonement for the weekly chapel service of a Christian university. Afterwards a senior came up to me and said, “Thank you. When I came here four years ago, I thought I would hear talks like this. We want to hear the Gospel, but they send us sociologists.”

It was sad, but not surprising when two years later, I heard the leadership of that university wonder aloud why their graduates would easily refer to “God,” in the general, but rarely to “Christ” in the specific.

It may be politically correct to speak in unctuous, non-demanding platitudes about loving, communicating and working with each other towards a just society. We may insist on legal and ethical behavior as our aspiration, but who is our inspiration?  Without the Spirit of God and faith in Jesus Christ who alone can reconcile us to God, we are simply playing the trivia contest of legalism (Matt 23:23).

The Apostle Paul wrote this truth about our missing connection to God: “You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision or uncircumcision (the appearance of religious commitment) counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Gal 5:4-6).

Adam and Eve fell from grace in the arrogance that they could determine “good and evil” for themselves without a connection to God (Gen 3:4-5). We have been bungling along ever since with a lot of folks trying to justify their rejection of God and others of us trying to justify ourselves to God, but all of us missing the mark. It was clear from the beginning that if things were to be put right in creation, the Creator would have to do it (Heb 1).

The prophets spoke of a Messiah, a Savior who would appear to restore God’s errant children to righteous fellowship with their Heavenly Father. The woman at the well knows something of the Word of God and the prophecies of the Messiah, but Scripture is nothing more than a literary anthology without God breathing the Word into us as a living reality.

The conversation between Jesus and the woman is germinating the seeds of spiritual truth planted deep in her soul. In the soaking of the Living Water and warming sunlight of Grace personified, the seeds are coming to life. Who knows who planted the seeds there long before–a parent, a teacher, a friend? They lay dormant in her like tulip bulbs in the cold and dark of winter until this moment.

The tender plant of life with God is being coaxed to the surface, one thing leading to another — the offer, the acceptance, the deeper penetration of truth, the shedding of the husks of religious tradition and misconception — until at last there is a break-through into the light. There “the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings” in a beautiful poetic metaphor for Christ from the prophet Malachi (Mal 4:2).

Why is it necessary for the woman to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? There are those who think that just planting the seed ought to be enough. Studying the Word, memorizing it, insisting on its dictates as the rule of the congregation and community is represented to be life. But this is to mistake paper flowers for the real thing. Jesus says, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. but you don’t know me. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39-40).

Learning the Word without knowing the One who breathes the Word into existence is like laying kindling for a bonfire with no means of lighting it. Religious training without the compulsion of love is digging reservoirs and laying pipelines without a dependable connection to the water source.

What a cautionary tale there is in this for those who expect churches and church schools to deliver true believers at graduation and are bitterly critical when this doesn’t happen. “You can point the person to the Living Water, but you can’t make them drink,” to paraphrase an old saying.

Shortly before the journey that brought him to the well, Jesus told the scholar Nicodemus that the teachings of Israel about eternal life in the kingdom of God were a dead letter without the Spirit of God bringing new life to the heart and mind through belief in the Son of God (John 3:1-21).

Paul would later tell the new Christian believers that the one essential was being born again in Jesus Christ:  “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision (referring to outward signs of religious commitment) is anything, but a new creation is everything!” (Gal 6:14-15). He similarly wrote to the Corinthians, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor 3:7).

I attended church schools from first grade to graduate school, went to church from the first month I was born, prayed and listened to Scripture and sang the great songs of the faith in my home for as far back as I can remember. Then when I was 36-years of age I had an encounter with Christ that made his life the compelling circumstance of my existence. When I gave my mother my testimony, she demanded “Surely, we must have done something right?”with a hurt and defensive tone as if she and my father had failed me.

“Mom,” I said. This isn’t about you or something you failed to do for me. Please understand. I am grateful for all the sacrifices that Dad and you made to educate me in church school and all of the family worships and the sermons and lessons that taught me about Jesus. Those things are the building blocks of my faith, but it took Jesus to bring that faith to a living reality.”

Job’s observation to the Lord, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” is accurate in my experience. It is his surpassing love that undid me and leaves me undone to this day.

When I accepted the truth of Ephesians 1:3-14 that my God and Father chose me “In Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love”. . . destined me for adoption as his child through Jesus Christ because that was his good pleasure. . .lavished grace on me by giving Jesus’ life to redeem me from enslavement to sin. . . and sealed me to himself with the Holy Spirit as his loved and his own” I wanted to die for the first and only time in my life. Facing God’s relentless, unconditional love made me realize how stained and corrupt I was and it made me sick. I begged him to take the filthy rags of my pride and selfishness and to clothe me in the robe of Jesus’ righteousness.

More than twenty-five years have passed since my shattering encounter with Christ. I’ve learned that I know a lot less about God than I thought I did back then, but I trust him much more. This is the difference between knowing stuff about God and knowing Jesus.

“When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us,” the woman tells Jesus about the Messiah (John 4:25). She has it right. Everything, the ordinary and the extraordinary, is different with Jesus.

It is time to surrender the “if only” of our expectations. “I am He,” says Jesus, our Savior and our reality. He is who we need to know. His Living Water is what we need to drink.

“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.