Dear People Who Keep Company With God,
The story of the woman at the well in John 4 may be more relevant in our day than at any other time. There is so much in this story, such as worship, supernatural, evangelism, reaping and sowing and so on. But the crescendo of the story is that God finds us worthy of His love in spite of our bankrupt souls and He will pursue us to make sure we know how much He values and loves us.
In 2003, the Lord spoke to me about a generation of young women who were morally bankrupt. He said, “There is coming a day when a flood of morally bankrupt young women, much like the woman at the well, will come to the church looking for help. Will you be ready?”
That was eleven years ago. I have dreamed of starting churches for young morally bankrupt women along with the guys that will follow them into the kingdom. Whenever they cross my path I sense the Lord’s heart toward them and I am reminded of what He said and the question He asked, “Will you be ready?”
I have concluded the best way to be ready is to go deeper with the Man at the well. He is the center of the story. Without the Man at the well, it would have been just another hard day for the woman, but it wasn’t. It was a turning point for her and the whole town of Sycar.
The conversation at the well is one of the longest one-on-one conversations recorded in the New Testament. It is full of insights on how the Lord perceives a morally bankrupt woman and how He chose to speak to the depths of her heart. I don’t think we can make a formula out of the discussion, but it can help to open our eyes to some of His ways with the ethical issues we are facing today.
Jesus had to break the cultural, racial, socio-economic and religious etiquette of His day just to hold a conversation with the woman. Jews weren’t supposed to speak to Samaritans, much less drink from their water bottle. Men weren’t permitted to address women without their husbands present. Rabbis would not speak to women, even their own wives, in public. If we are going to bring the kingdom to the morally bankrupt of society it will be messy and controversial. Like Jesus, we may have to do some things that will appear to be socially, culturally and even spiritually taboo to reach the morally bankrupt. Expect to be frowned upon.
The woman knew she was messed up, but tried to use politics and questions of religion and spirituality to elude the real issue of her heart. There are agenda’s – LGBT rights, same sex marriage, abortion and so on that we are going to have to wade through to get to the heart of the contemporary women and men at the well.
We have to be supernatural to pull this off. In one sentence Jesus shifted the discussion from the everyday, natural and all the worldly agendas to the spiritual. This lady did not only have a moral problem she had a spiritual problem. That is what we have to see. It is spiritual. The root of all our real problems is spiritual.
It is going to take time and a willingness to go where they are. Jesus purposefully went through Samaria. He could have gone around it as most good Jews did in His day. The Lord loves and values the morally bankrupt so much that He will actively seek them and have an in depth conversation in order to speak to their hearts. Lord let us see them as you do.
Many Blessings, BW