Shedding religion, seeking relationship.
John 4 is the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. It precedes some of Paul’s conversations mentioned yesterday, Jesus talking about living water while the woman came for the natural well water. Jesus began with the natural to lift her eyes to spiritual realities.
Even the name Samaritan was a term of contempt to religious Jews, yet Jesus engaged with this woman, to her surprise. After recognising Him as a prophet, she began to discuss the place where God should be worshipped, on this mountain or in Jerusalem?
‘BELIEVE ME WOMAN, A TIME IS COMING when you will worship the Father neither… place(He was saying the Temple in Jerusalem, traditional Jewish religion, would no longer be at the heart of worshipping God). Yet A TIME IS COMING AND HAS NOW COME when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth’. John 4:21,23 Jesus had just announced a new era, the age of the Church, to a Samaritan and a woman!
’Many of the Samaritans from that time believed in him because of the woman’s testimony. ‘He told me everything I ever did’. And because of His words many more became believers. …now we have HEARD HIM FOR OURSELVES, we know that this man is the Saviour of the world’. Jn 4:39-42
These Samaritans, in a sense had leap-frogged or jumped past the religious traditions of the Temple(from which they were excluded anyway)! They’d had personal encounter with the Lord and become believers in Him. The religious people resolutely opposed Jesus and later Paul, they fought to protect all the rituals of their traditions, but the new era had begun. Could we today be at a similar time in history(His story), are we moving from the Church age to the age of the Kingdom, coming now on the earth? If the answer is yes, then we too will have to shed much of our way of doing things. True worship for these Samaritans began with an encounter and they had grace to accept what the Lord offered them.
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