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Two different people, two different encounters with Jesus, and yet there's a few lessons we need to learn from each encounter.
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Today we are looking at the story of the woman at the well and Jesus healing the official's son in Cana.
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And so today's going to be a little different format.
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We are going to read through the text, and then instead of going verse by verse, I'm going to go story by story.
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And I've got some resources over here on my computer from gotquestions.org as well as the Logos Bible app.
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So let's get into it.
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Hello, my name is Wendy, and on this channel we do Bible study so that you know what you believe, why, so that you can give a reason for the hope that is within you with gentleness and respect.
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So with that, let's open up in a word of prayer.
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Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us together to study your word, to get to know you, to increase in our knowledge of you, and just to be in community, to have the privilege to do what we do every day.
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Whether we study in person with a group or whether we study virtually, Lord, we just thank you for this honor and this privilege, and we thank you for the precious blood of Jesus.
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This we pray in Jesus' name.
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Amen.
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All right.
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So once again, I am reading from the English Standard Version.
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Your version might be different, but uh concepts are still the same.
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So let's get into it.
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John chapter 4.
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Now, when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although Jesus himself did not baptize but only his disciples, he left Judea and departed again for Galilee, and he had to pass through Samaria.
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So he came to a town of Samaria called Sikar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
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Jacob's well was there.
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So Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well.
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It was about the sixth hour.
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A woman from Samaria came to draw water.
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Jesus said to her, Give me a drink.
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For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
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The Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?
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For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
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Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you the living water.
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The woman said to him, Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep.
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Where do you get that living water?
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Are you greater than our father Jacob?
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He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.
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Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty again.
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The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
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The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.
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Jesus said to her, Go, call your husband and come here.
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The woman the woman answered him, I have no husband.
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Jesus said to her, You are right in saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.
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What you have said is true.
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The woman said to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.
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Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.
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Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.
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You will you worship what you do not know, we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
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But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.
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For the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
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God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
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The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming, he who is called Christ.
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When he comes, he will tell us all things.
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Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am He.
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Just then his disciples came back.
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They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, What do you seek, or why are you talking with her?
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So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.
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Can this be the Christ?
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They went out of the town and were coming to him.
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Meanwhile, the disciples were urging him, saying, Rabbi, eat.
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But he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about.
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So the disciples said to one another, Has anyone brought him something to eat?
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Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.
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Do not say, There are yet four months, then comes the harvest.
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Or do you not say, There are yet four months, then comes the harvest?
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Look, I tell you, lift up lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest.
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Although the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the already sorry, already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice to may rejoice together.
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For here the saying holds true One sows and another reaps.
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I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor.
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Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.
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Many Samaritans from the that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.
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He told me all that I ever did.
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So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days, and many more believed because of his word.
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They said to the woman, It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.
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After the two days he departed for Galilee, for Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his home own hometown.
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So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast, for they too had gone to the feast.
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So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine.
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And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill.
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When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.
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So Jesus said to him, Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.
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The official said to him, Sir, come down before my child dies.
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Jesus said to him, Go, your son will live.
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The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way.
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As he was going down, his servants met him and told them that his son was recovering.
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So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, Yesterday at the seventh hour, the fever left him.
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The father knew that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, Your son will live.
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And he himself believed in all his household.
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This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.
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Alright, so there's a lot, a lot of verses, a lot going on.
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So we're not taking this verse by verse, like I said, we're going to take this story by story.
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And honestly, we could go for days.
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I could write a whole book about the woman at the well and this encounter with the Samaritan woman.
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Um, but there are some truths that we can extract from this conversation.
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Um, whether you've heard this story for the first time today or whether you've heard it a million times.
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And so the resource that I'm using for this particular uh story is gotquestions.org.
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And I will leave a link in the description in show notes so that you can do more research yourself.
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And what we are learning here is that um this follows the encounter with Nicodemus.
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So if you put the encounter with Nicodemus side by side with the the encounter with the Samaritan woman, you actually see kind of two opposite people, and I won't go through like point by point that they are opposites, but we are talking about a people, the Samaritans, who Jews generally did not associate with.
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Okay, they were um the woman, the women of Samaria were considered ritually continuously unclean.
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And as you may have heard in the story of the Good Samaritan, this is just not these are just not people considered worthy to for lack of a better word.
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Um, they have the Jews believed that the Samaritans had no claim on their God, and so this woman was an outcast and looked down by her own people, um, not just because of her five husbands and being with a sixth man, but because she is a Samaritan and person and a person of mixed race.
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So, what I want to draw your attention to is the brokenness of her life.
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Now, she came by herself to draw water from the well, and this is where she encountered Jesus.
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That's not that was not normal practice, the water was, but to go alone.
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So you may have heard or you may not have heard that this was drawing water at the well was something, it was a group activity, so it was like um kind of like being at the office water cooler, right?
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So the women would go and this they would draw water from the well, and this would be their chance to socialize.
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But this woman was so outcast in this town that she couldn't do that, she had to go later on in the day.
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Um, and Jesus, knowing all that is to know about man, would know and understand that this is the woman who's going to be there at this particular point in time.
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So she was ostracized, she was marked as immoral, and again, she was an unmarried woman living openly with the sixth in a series of men.
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But what does the story teach us about God's love?
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Well, I think it shows us that in spite of our bankrupt lives, in spite of everything that we've done that is contrary to goodness and God's will, that God values us enough to actively seek us, to welcome us into intimacy, and to rejoice in our worship.
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That is that is how it's put in on the God Questions article.
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So as a result of this conversation, as a result of this confrontation with this personal uh confrontation with Jesus, only a person like this Samaritan woman, an outcast from her own people, could understand what this means, to be seen, to be wanted, to be understood.
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And isn't that all what we all want?
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Isn't that what we often attribute to our spouses or our children or our or the people we work with?
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You know, we we want so much to be acknowledged, to be cherished, to be loved.
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God offers all of that unconditionally, but people will fail you.
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Human beings can and will withdraw that love.
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Even though as Christians we strive for the agape, self-sacrificial love that Jesus has displayed for us.
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We are imperfect and we sin.
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And so we find it hard to love people who A, don't love us back, B, have treated us poorly, and C just aren't fulfilling the need that we have deep down inside.
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But that's a God-shaped hole.
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It's a hole that only God's love can fill.
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Okay.
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And I think that when she encountered Jesus and realized this is who she's talking to, that he could see anything of value in her that she was extended this grace, I think she was elated.
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And I think that that is how you and I are when we truly encounter the love of God.
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To um, as uh as the song Amazing Grace says, um, it saved a wretch like me.
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So how much more if God's grace was extended to this woman at the well, would it be extended to you or me or to the people we don't like, to the people we've come to hate, to the people, not that we should be hating anybody, to the people who in our human minds we think do not deserve God's love.
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But the truth of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, that none of us deserve it, none of us, because of our sin nature, deserve to be in proximity with God.
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But Jesus stood in that gap and has made a way for us.
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So it it stands to reason that if we as individuals have been given this opportunity and this great love, that we should point others to Jesus as well.
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And so um there are some other truths that um we can glean from the story, and this is what it says on gotquestions.org that one, only through Jesus can we obtain and receive eternal life.
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So we've gone over this uh in the previous video where we talked about John chapter 3, verse 16, and then later on, when we get to chapter 14, we will see Jesus' exclusive claim that he is the only way to heaven, he is the only way to the Father.
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Number two, Jesus ministering to those outcasts of the Jewish society, the Samaritans, reveals that all people are valuable to God and that Jesus desires that we demonstrate love to everyone, including our enemies.
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And whoo, that is hard.
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That's kind of why they're our enemies, right?
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But it is difficult, but it's so difficult that on we can only do it through God's power, through God's strength.
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So when somebody says, How can you forgive such and such, they did this thing to you, or how can you love your enemy?
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You know that we love because he first loved us.
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You know that it is through God's strength that we are able to love people as God does.
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Okay?
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So truth number three, Jesus is the Messiah.
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We've already established that.
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And truth number four, those who worship God worship him in truth and spirit.
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And number five, our testimony about Jesus is a powerful tool in leading others to believe in him.
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It is not the only thing that lead other that leads others to believe in him, but it is a powerful tool.
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Okay?
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And then there are three other things according to this article that we can learn about salvation.
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Number one, salvation comes only to those who recognize their desperate need for the spiritual life they do not have.
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And that is very important because if you walk up to someone and says, Jesus loves you, or Jesus forgives your sins, or Jesus is the only one who can forgive your sins, but the person doesn't recognize that they're doing anything wrong, therefore, they don't feel like they need a savior, that's a different issue and that's a different obstacle.
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So the person, the individual, must recognize their need for a savior.
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They must recognize that they are living in sin and understand the consequences of continuing to live in sin and not having Jesus as their savior.
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Number two, salvation comes only to those who confess and repent of their sin and desire forgiveness.
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So point number two follows point number one.
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And then point number three is that salvation comes only to those who take hold of Jesus as their Messiah.
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For the absolute truth is that salvation is found in no one else.
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Again, see John 14, chapter 14, verse 6.
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Okay, which it's gonna take us a few days to get there, but we will get there.
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So these are the lessons that um I kind of succinctly wanted to take you through with the woman at the well.
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At a later date, we will do a more extensive deep dive into the woman at the well and that encounter that Jesus had with her.
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Um, I don't know how we're gonna do that in what format, but this is definitely something into which we should dive deeper.
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Now, with that, let's hop on over to the Logos Bible software and we're gonna talk about the healing of the official's son.
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So after Jesus leaves Samaria, after he's been in Samaria for two days, um, they go to Galilee, and this royal official who's not named, so we don't know if he's Gentile or Jewish, um encounters Jesus.
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His son being sick, almost to the point of death, and if he's coming to Jesus, I the the commentary says that it's likely he has exhausted all other means of curing his son.
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So his power, his privilege, his money could do nothing to save his son, and only Jesus could save his son.
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But Jesus kind of had some sharp words for this man in saying that a faith built only on miraculous signs is not a complete faith, and that many hesitate to believe in Jesus apart from seeing miraculous signs and wonders.
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But faith in Jesus is absolutely necessary, but not all believers are given public signs.
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So signs are great, God can do whatever he wants, but when people demand a sign, their faith would still be incomplete.
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At least that's what I'm getting from this.
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It's the beginning, but it's not the totality of it.
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They still need that personal uh encounter with Jesus, recognize their sin, accepting him as as Messiah.
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So it's not enough to show uh the signs and wonders, because if it was, then that's all Jesus would have had to have done.
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But even in the face of doing these signs and wonders, people still did not believe.
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Many people did not believe.
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And as we have seen or will see, many people only followed him because of the signs and wonders.
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And then when he did not fulfill what they thought he was supposed to do as Messiah in terms of freeing them from Roman occupation, they left him, they deserted him.
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Why?
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Because signs and wonders aren't enough.
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That personal encounter, that belief in Jesus as the Messiah, that he sees you, he loves you, and he is your means of salvation, that that transformative faith is in belief is what we need.
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And so, again, Jesus heals his son, but those stern words, you know, it it kind of rings true for all of us.
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Like, how many times have we asked for God to give us a sign about what job we should take, where we should move, who we should marry, um any any and everything.
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But we learn what God wants and we learn God's will through our encounters with Him.
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That's why we do, that's why we study the Word, that's why we go to church, that's why we stay in prayer, that's why we do these things, so that in our knowledge of God increasing, we can know God's good and perfect will.
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See Romans 12, 1 and 2.
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Okay.
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So the last thing I want to leave you with here is that both of the first and second signs that John points us to occurred in Galilee.
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So at the wedding feast at Cana, he changed the water into wine and now healing the official son.
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But both signs were still pretty much hidden because only a few people were able to witness these miracles and signs.
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So again, Jesus isn't publicly saying, Here I am, you know, let me do these public signs because his hour had not yet come.
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So um these signs are pretty hidden, pretty private.
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And I just wanted you to know and to remember that Jesus hadn't really publicly performed these yet.
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Um, and even to the point at the beginning of chapter four where it says Jesus was not the one individually baptizing people, that it was his disciples who were baptizing people.
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So all of this will come to make sense as we continue to go through the book of John, the gospel according to John.
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And in the next video, we are going to talk about Jesus healing at the pool on the Sabbath, how Jesus is equal with God, the authority of the Son, and the witnesses to Jesus.
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All of that is going on in chapter five.
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If you want to read ahead, be my guest.
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Um, again, I am pulling notes from the Bible commentary.
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Um, digitally, I used the logos by Bible study software and gotquestions.org.
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So I will leave all those resources in the description and show notes for you.
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Thank you so much for joining me today.
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Um let me know if you prefer this verse by verse that we've been doing, or if you prefer like kind of block by block or story by story.
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Um I think it really depends on the text, but if you have a preference, let me know in the comments.
00:24:39.759 --> 00:24:49.279
Also, if you're watching this before Sunday, I'm doing a special celebratory live stream to celebrate crossing 8,000 subscribers.
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Thank you so, so much for those of you who have chosen to subscribe to this channel.
00:24:54.480 --> 00:24:57.200
Um, and if you haven't, what are you waiting for?
00:24:57.359 --> 00:25:06.799
Um, but we will go live and I will answer your questions so you can pre submit questions in the comments or on the community post.
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Um, and I will see you in the next video.
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All right.
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God bless you.
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Have a great day.
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Bye for now.
00:00:00.320 --> 00:00:10.000
Two different people, two different encounters with Jesus, and yet there's a few lessons we need to learn from each encounter.
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Today we are looking at the story of the woman at the well and Jesus healing the official's son in Cana.
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And so today's going to be a little different format.
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We are going to read through the text, and then instead of going verse by verse, I'm going to go story by story.
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And I've got some resources over here on my computer from gotquestions.org as well as the Logos Bible app.
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So let's get into it.
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Hello, my name is Wendy, and on this channel we do Bible study so that you know what you believe, why, so that you can give a reason for the hope that is within you with gentleness and respect.
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So with that, let's open up in a word of prayer.
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Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us together to study your word, to get to know you, to increase in our knowledge of you, and just to be in community, to have the privilege to do what we do every day.
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Whether we study in person with a group or whether we study virtually, Lord, we just thank you for this honor and this privilege, and we thank you for the precious blood of Jesus.
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This we pray in Jesus' name.
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Amen.
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All right.
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So once again, I am reading from the English Standard Version.
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Your version might be different, but uh concepts are still the same.
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So let's get into it.
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John chapter 4.
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Now, when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although Jesus himself did not baptize but only his disciples, he left Judea and departed again for Galilee, and he had to pass through Samaria.
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So he came to a town of Samaria called Sikar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
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Jacob's well was there.
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So Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well.
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It was about the sixth hour.
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A woman from Samaria came to draw water.
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Jesus said to her, Give me a drink.
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For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
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The Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?
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For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
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Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you the living water.
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The woman said to him, Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep.
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Where do you get that living water?
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Are you greater than our father Jacob?
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He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.
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Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty again.
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The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
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The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.
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Jesus said to her, Go, call your husband and come here.
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The woman the woman answered him, I have no husband.
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Jesus said to her, You are right in saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.
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What you have said is true.
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The woman said to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.
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Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.
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Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.
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You will you worship what you do not know, we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
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But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.
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For the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
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God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
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The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming, he who is called Christ.
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When he comes, he will tell us all things.
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Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am He.
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Just then his disciples came back.
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They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, What do you seek, or why are you talking with her?
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So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.
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Can this be the Christ?
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They went out of the town and were coming to him.
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Meanwhile, the disciples were urging him, saying, Rabbi, eat.
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But he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about.
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So the disciples said to one another, Has anyone brought him something to eat?
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Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.
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Do not say, There are yet four months, then comes the harvest.
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Or do you not say, There are yet four months, then comes the harvest?
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Look, I tell you, lift up lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest.
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Although the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the already sorry, already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice to may rejoice together.
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For here the saying holds true One sows and another reaps.
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I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor.
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Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.
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Many Samaritans from the that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.
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He told me all that I ever did.
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So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days, and many more believed because of his word.
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They said to the woman, It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.
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After the two days he departed for Galilee, for Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his home own hometown.
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So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast, for they too had gone to the feast.
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So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine.
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And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill.
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When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.
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So Jesus said to him, Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.
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The official said to him, Sir, come down before my child dies.
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Jesus said to him, Go, your son will live.
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The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way.
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As he was going down, his servants met him and told them that his son was recovering.
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So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, Yesterday at the seventh hour, the fever left him.
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The father knew that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, Your son will live.
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And he himself believed in all his household.
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This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.
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Alright, so there's a lot, a lot of verses, a lot going on.
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So we're not taking this verse by verse, like I said, we're going to take this story by story.
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And honestly, we could go for days.
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I could write a whole book about the woman at the well and this encounter with the Samaritan woman.
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Um, but there are some truths that we can extract from this conversation.
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Um, whether you've heard this story for the first time today or whether you've heard it a million times.
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And so the resource that I'm using for this particular uh story is gotquestions.org.
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And I will leave a link in the description in show notes so that you can do more research yourself.
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And what we are learning here is that um this follows the encounter with Nicodemus.
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So if you put the encounter with Nicodemus side by side with the the encounter with the Samaritan woman, you actually see kind of two opposite people, and I won't go through like point by point that they are opposites, but we are talking about a people, the Samaritans, who Jews generally did not associate with.
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Okay, they were um the woman, the women of Samaria were considered ritually continuously unclean.
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And as you may have heard in the story of the Good Samaritan, this is just not these are just not people considered worthy to for lack of a better word.
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Um, they have the Jews believed that the Samaritans had no claim on their God, and so this woman was an outcast and looked down by her own people, um, not just because of her five husbands and being with a sixth man, but because she is a Samaritan and person and a person of mixed race.
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So, what I want to draw your attention to is the brokenness of her life.
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Now, she came by herself to draw water from the well, and this is where she encountered Jesus.
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That's not that was not normal practice, the water was, but to go alone.
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So you may have heard or you may not have heard that this was drawing water at the well was something, it was a group activity, so it was like um kind of like being at the office water cooler, right?
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So the women would go and this they would draw water from the well, and this would be their chance to socialize.
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But this woman was so outcast in this town that she couldn't do that, she had to go later on in the day.
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Um, and Jesus, knowing all that is to know about man, would know and understand that this is the woman who's going to be there at this particular point in time.
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So she was ostracized, she was marked as immoral, and again, she was an unmarried woman living openly with the sixth in a series of men.
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But what does the story teach us about God's love?
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Well, I think it shows us that in spite of our bankrupt lives, in spite of everything that we've done that is contrary to goodness and God's will, that God values us enough to actively seek us, to welcome us into intimacy, and to rejoice in our worship.
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That is that is how it's put in on the God Questions article.
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So as a result of this conversation, as a result of this confrontation with this personal uh confrontation with Jesus, only a person like this Samaritan woman, an outcast from her own people, could understand what this means, to be seen, to be wanted, to be understood.
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And isn't that all what we all want?
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Isn't that what we often attribute to our spouses or our children or our or the people we work with?
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You know, we we want so much to be acknowledged, to be cherished, to be loved.
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God offers all of that unconditionally, but people will fail you.
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Human beings can and will withdraw that love.
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Even though as Christians we strive for the agape, self-sacrificial love that Jesus has displayed for us.
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We are imperfect and we sin.
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And so we find it hard to love people who A, don't love us back, B, have treated us poorly, and C just aren't fulfilling the need that we have deep down inside.
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But that's a God-shaped hole.
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It's a hole that only God's love can fill.
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Okay.
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And I think that when she encountered Jesus and realized this is who she's talking to, that he could see anything of value in her that she was extended this grace, I think she was elated.
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And I think that that is how you and I are when we truly encounter the love of God.
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To um, as uh as the song Amazing Grace says, um, it saved a wretch like me.
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So how much more if God's grace was extended to this woman at the well, would it be extended to you or me or to the people we don't like, to the people we've come to hate, to the people, not that we should be hating anybody, to the people who in our human minds we think do not deserve God's love.
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But the truth of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, that none of us deserve it, none of us, because of our sin nature, deserve to be in proximity with God.
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But Jesus stood in that gap and has made a way for us.
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So it it stands to reason that if we as individuals have been given this opportunity and this great love, that we should point others to Jesus as well.
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And so um there are some other truths that um we can glean from the story, and this is what it says on gotquestions.org that one, only through Jesus can we obtain and receive eternal life.
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So we've gone over this uh in the previous video where we talked about John chapter 3, verse 16, and then later on, when we get to chapter 14, we will see Jesus' exclusive claim that he is the only way to heaven, he is the only way to the Father.
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Number two, Jesus ministering to those outcasts of the Jewish society, the Samaritans, reveals that all people are valuable to God and that Jesus desires that we demonstrate love to everyone, including our enemies.
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And whoo, that is hard.
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That's kind of why they're our enemies, right?
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But it is difficult, but it's so difficult that on we can only do it through God's power, through God's strength.
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So when somebody says, How can you forgive such and such, they did this thing to you, or how can you love your enemy?
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You know that we love because he first loved us.
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You know that it is through God's strength that we are able to love people as God does.
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Okay?
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So truth number three, Jesus is the Messiah.
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We've already established that.
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And truth number four, those who worship God worship him in truth and spirit.
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And number five, our testimony about Jesus is a powerful tool in leading others to believe in him.
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It is not the only thing that lead other that leads others to believe in him, but it is a powerful tool.
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Okay?
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And then there are three other things according to this article that we can learn about salvation.
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Number one, salvation comes only to those who recognize their desperate need for the spiritual life they do not have.
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And that is very important because if you walk up to someone and says, Jesus loves you, or Jesus forgives your sins, or Jesus is the only one who can forgive your sins, but the person doesn't recognize that they're doing anything wrong, therefore, they don't feel like they need a savior, that's a different issue and that's a different obstacle.
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So the person, the individual, must recognize their need for a savior.
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They must recognize that they are living in sin and understand the consequences of continuing to live in sin and not having Jesus as their savior.
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Number two, salvation comes only to those who confess and repent of their sin and desire forgiveness.
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So point number two follows point number one.
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And then point number three is that salvation comes only to those who take hold of Jesus as their Messiah.
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For the absolute truth is that salvation is found in no one else.
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Again, see John 14, chapter 14, verse 6.
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Okay, which it's gonna take us a few days to get there, but we will get there.
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So these are the lessons that um I kind of succinctly wanted to take you through with the woman at the well.
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At a later date, we will do a more extensive deep dive into the woman at the well and that encounter that Jesus had with her.
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Um, I don't know how we're gonna do that in what format, but this is definitely something into which we should dive deeper.
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Now, with that, let's hop on over to the Logos Bible software and we're gonna talk about the healing of the official's son.
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So after Jesus leaves Samaria, after he's been in Samaria for two days, um, they go to Galilee, and this royal official who's not named, so we don't know if he's Gentile or Jewish, um encounters Jesus.
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His son being sick, almost to the point of death, and if he's coming to Jesus, I the the commentary says that it's likely he has exhausted all other means of curing his son.
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So his power, his privilege, his money could do nothing to save his son, and only Jesus could save his son.
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But Jesus kind of had some sharp words for this man in saying that a faith built only on miraculous signs is not a complete faith, and that many hesitate to believe in Jesus apart from seeing miraculous signs and wonders.
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But faith in Jesus is absolutely necessary, but not all believers are given public signs.
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So signs are great, God can do whatever he wants, but when people demand a sign, their faith would still be incomplete.
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At least that's what I'm getting from this.
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It's the beginning, but it's not the totality of it.
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They still need that personal uh encounter with Jesus, recognize their sin, accepting him as as Messiah.
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So it's not enough to show uh the signs and wonders, because if it was, then that's all Jesus would have had to have done.
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But even in the face of doing these signs and wonders, people still did not believe.
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Many people did not believe.
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And as we have seen or will see, many people only followed him because of the signs and wonders.
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And then when he did not fulfill what they thought he was supposed to do as Messiah in terms of freeing them from Roman occupation, they left him, they deserted him.
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Why?
00:21:16.240 --> 00:21:18.240
Because signs and wonders aren't enough.
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That personal encounter, that belief in Jesus as the Messiah, that he sees you, he loves you, and he is your means of salvation, that that transformative faith is in belief is what we need.
00:21:36.880 --> 00:21:47.359
And so, again, Jesus heals his son, but those stern words, you know, it it kind of rings true for all of us.
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Like, how many times have we asked for God to give us a sign about what job we should take, where we should move, who we should marry, um any any and everything.
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But we learn what God wants and we learn God's will through our encounters with Him.
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That's why we do, that's why we study the Word, that's why we go to church, that's why we stay in prayer, that's why we do these things, so that in our knowledge of God increasing, we can know God's good and perfect will.
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See Romans 12, 1 and 2.
00:22:22.559 --> 00:22:22.880
Okay.
00:22:24.720 --> 00:22:35.200
So the last thing I want to leave you with here is that both of the first and second signs that John points us to occurred in Galilee.
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So at the wedding feast at Cana, he changed the water into wine and now healing the official son.
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But both signs were still pretty much hidden because only a few people were able to witness these miracles and signs.
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So again, Jesus isn't publicly saying, Here I am, you know, let me do these public signs because his hour had not yet come.
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So um these signs are pretty hidden, pretty private.
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And I just wanted you to know and to remember that Jesus hadn't really publicly performed these yet.
00:23:21.839 --> 00:23:33.039
Um, and even to the point at the beginning of chapter four where it says Jesus was not the one individually baptizing people, that it was his disciples who were baptizing people.
00:23:33.359 --> 00:23:43.920
So all of this will come to make sense as we continue to go through the book of John, the gospel according to John.
00:23:44.400 --> 00:23:57.039
And in the next video, we are going to talk about Jesus healing at the pool on the Sabbath, how Jesus is equal with God, the authority of the Son, and the witnesses to Jesus.
00:23:57.599 --> 00:23:59.759
All of that is going on in chapter five.
00:23:59.839 --> 00:24:02.400
If you want to read ahead, be my guest.
00:24:02.559 --> 00:24:06.960
Um, again, I am pulling notes from the Bible commentary.
00:24:07.039 --> 00:24:15.359
Um, digitally, I used the logos by Bible study software and gotquestions.org.
00:24:15.440 --> 00:24:19.599
So I will leave all those resources in the description and show notes for you.
00:24:19.920 --> 00:24:22.319
Thank you so much for joining me today.
00:24:22.480 --> 00:24:32.720
Um let me know if you prefer this verse by verse that we've been doing, or if you prefer like kind of block by block or story by story.
00:24:32.960 --> 00:24:39.599
Um I think it really depends on the text, but if you have a preference, let me know in the comments.
00:24:39.759 --> 00:24:49.279
Also, if you're watching this before Sunday, I'm doing a special celebratory live stream to celebrate crossing 8,000 subscribers.
00:24:49.440 --> 00:24:54.319
Thank you so, so much for those of you who have chosen to subscribe to this channel.
00:24:54.480 --> 00:24:57.200
Um, and if you haven't, what are you waiting for?
00:24:57.359 --> 00:25:06.799
Um, but we will go live and I will answer your questions so you can pre submit questions in the comments or on the community post.
00:25:07.279 --> 00:25:10.720
Um, and I will see you in the next video.
00:25:10.880 --> 00:25:11.440
All right.
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God bless you.
00:25:13.200 --> 00:25:14.160
Have a great day.
00:25:14.400 --> 00:25:15.440
Bye for now.
