Sharing Christ Christ's Way

Wow, it is great to have you guys here. I am so stoked to be back with you. I've been gone almost three weeks. I just returned from Israel leading a church group, and let me just tell you, Israel is 10 hours different than the states. I just got back, and so I am so loopy from jet lag and the time change. There is no telling what's gonna come out of my mouth. So, beyond the edge of your seats this morning!

I was over there leading a church group with my wife, and we were also filming videos for the new fall series that's coming up here at Twin Lakes Church. Several other churches around the country are going to be doing this simultaneously with us. We're calling it "On the Trail of King David," and from September to November, we're gonna be looking at eight episodes in David's life, filmed at the exact spots in Israel where these episodes took place. I mean, we explored caves and archaeological digs. One archaeologist who teaches at Hebrew University even took us to a brand new excavation where they have uncovered amazing evidence supporting the Bible's narrative about King David. All of this hits this fall at TLC. I am super stoked about this. Are you guys excited? I am excited about this!

Let me just say, I'm writing a book. Jamie Romm, our videographer, is editing the small group videos that we filmed there over the next three or four months. Would you please promise to pray for this and pray that the Lord would use it? Raise your hand if you will pray for us. Good! Those of you who didn't raise your hand, why not? Why didn't you raise your hand? But I really appreciate you, and that all hits this fall at TLC.

Now also, while in Jerusalem, we just this past Tuesday night, in fact, we ran into this guy, Michael Sin. I want to start the message this morning by telling you a little bit of Michael's backstory. Michael grew up in a family where almost everybody in his grandparents' generation was murdered by the Nazis in prison camps during World War II. In fact, his grandfather was one of the only relatives in his generation that survived, but at great cost. The guards in the concentration camp where his grandfather was decided to keep him alive for sport. Every Saturday, because it was the Jewish Sabbath, they would say, "We've got something special for your Sabbath day, you Jew." They would take him, and two guards would kneel on him and lean on him on the ground, push his face into the ground, and then they would beat him while coming really close to his ears and whisper to him, "Happy Sabbath, Shabbat Shalom," as they would punch him in the face.

His grandfather told Michael one of his indelible memories was that both of these guards were wearing crosses around their necks on chains, and he could feel the crosses brushing his own neck as they beat him up every Saturday. Then the next day, Sunday, both of those guards would put on their Sunday best and go to church as good Christian boys. When his grandfather got out of the concentration camp, that was the picture he had of Christians. When Michael was a very little boy, his grandfather told him repeatedly, "I don't care what you do with your life. You could become an atheist as far as I'm concerned, as long as you don't become one of those Christians after what they have done to our people." Never a Christian. Understandably, right? Who would blame him for saying that?

Well, Michael did indeed become an atheist, living in Jerusalem, pursuing his PhD. A brilliant scholar. To tell you the kind of family he had, his kids all became professional classical musicians. One of his sons is now the conductor of a symphony orchestra in New York City. Very, very high-achieving family. Yet Michael realized something was missing. Specifically, he had no joy. He told us on Tuesday night when we met him, he said, "I was all head and no heart." Then there in Jerusalem, some new neighbors moved in, also a Jewish couple just like Michael and his wife, and yet they were so full of joy. Michael said everybody around us always complained about everything, but this new young couple, these new neighbors, were so full of joy.

You know, not like overbearing, "Praise the Lord" all the time, but just this underlying kind of low-level hum of just joy in their lives. They invite Michael and his wife over for dinner regularly, and one night Michael leans over the dinner table and he asks, "I gotta just say, what is your secret to being so joyful?" The guy smiles and says, "Well, since you ask, we find our joy in our belief in Jesus as our Messiah." And Michael says even though he was an atheist, he literally prayed, "Oh my God!" The one thing he did not want, the one thing his parents had warned him against, and yet there was something there he couldn't deny.

This couple keeps inviting them over, just establishing a friendship, doesn't get overbearing about it, and yet Michael keeps asking questions. One night, Michael bows and prays to receive Jesus, Yeshua, as his Messiah, as his Savior, as his Lord. On Tuesday night, I told Michael, "You know, this weekend I'm going to be talking to our church about sharing their faith and how to do it effectively." I just want to ask you, how in the world did your neighbors communicate their faith in ways that got around your intellectual and emotional and cultural defenses? Wouldn't you like to know what he said? I'll tell you in just a minute, but right now grab your message notes as we continue our series building up to Easter 77. We call it "77 Days in the Life of Jesus Christ." This morning, we're in John 4 to talk about how to share Christ's way.

Here's why I believe it's just urgent that all of us hear this today. If you're here today, when the time changed, you lost an hour of sleep. That means you're probably here because your faith means something deeply personal to you, or at least you're very, very interested in checking out Jesus. Yet even though you're fascinated by Jesus, maybe you love Jesus, when you hear pastors and other people say Christians need to share their faith, that sort of fills you with just dread. Even if you want to share your faith, you feel clumsy or ill-prepared or awkward or uneasy. What you really want to know is how to share your faith without being unnecessarily offensive, right? How to share your faith in a way that you can do it without being a jerk, how to share your faith without driving people crazy. That's how most of us feel.

Now, there's another group here. You love to share your faith, and for some of you, you love to share your faith because it means you're kind of sanctioned to pick fights, right? To argue. You love to argue with people. You're one of those people, you know, in our social media world. Everybody loves to go online and argue, and so many Christians these days can come across, maybe unintentionally, as hot-headed and argumentative. Is that what it means to learn how to share your faith, to kind of get in people's face and argue? Well, in this story, you're going to see four ways that Jesus crosses boundaries to reach people. When you see these four ways, you'll see how instead of being divisive, instead of establishing his ground and saying, "This is what it means to believe in me, and you people and you people and you people are outsiders," instead of doing that, Jesus builds bridges.

This is important because they show us how to communicate our faith in ways that are beautiful and effective and not overbearing, ways that Michael Sin's neighbors did, as we will see as we go throughout this message. But there's another group I want to talk to here. There are people here who have been wondering, do I really fit in here as a Christian or as a member of a church? You've been feeling like, I love Jesus, but culturally I don't know if I'm a match with most of the people that I met who are Christians, or I've got a lot of questions about my faith that haven't been answered. Can I still be a Jesus follower even with questions? Or when I see people around me in church, I think I'm probably not in the same demographic politically or ethnically or socially or economically. Do I still belong here? In this story, you'll see how Jesus literally goes out of his way to welcome in people who would have felt exactly like you are feeling if that's where you're feeling right now.

So let's jump in. Four things we see Jesus doing in this amazing story. We're just gonna go through this verse by verse. First, we see the principle of close proximity. Close proximity. In other words, to share your faith, you need to get close to people. Kind of no duh, right? Like Michael Sin's neighbors, first they invite Michael and his wife over for dinner. They just get close to them. That's how it starts. Look how Jesus does this here in John 4, starting in verse 3. It says he left Judea, that's down by Jerusalem, and went back once more to Galilee, that's in the north part of Israel. Now it says he had to go through Samaria. It says Jesus had to go through Samaria. Had to! If you don't understand the context of first-century Israel, you'll miss that's a joke.

Because in those days, no religious Jew of the first century had to go through Samaria. Why not? Let me just give you some context. About 600 years before this story, the Jews were conquered by the attacking Babylonians. Most Jewish people were taken as captives out of Israel to Babylon, but a few were left in Israel, the very, very poor. They married with Gentiles and became known as the Samaritans. When many years later, about 70 years later, the Jewish people moved back in from Babylon, they looked at the Samaritans as collaborators, as traitors, as enemies. Because of how they intermarried, their religion had morphed a little bit too, and they said, "You know what? You are not us anymore." Historically, we know that they wouldn't let them worship in the Jerusalem temple; that was off-limits to the Samaritans. So the Samaritans said, "Fine! You won't let us worship on your mountain? We'll build a temple on our own mountain, a place called Mount Gerazim," and they built a temple there. At that point, the animosity just got worse and worse and worse. By the time Jesus is around, there is a history of tension. Think of any two groups among whom there's tension in America right now, you know, like Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, whatever. Black and white, whatever you think is happening in America right now, this was that times a thousand.

Let me just give you a couple of examples. For a while, when the Samaritans had the upper hand politically during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanies, who was a Syrian general, they literally sold Jewish men, women, and children into slavery to the Gentiles. Sold Jewish people into slavery. And then about 50 years later, when the Jews got the upper hand, they returned the favor and got back at the Samaritans by literally capturing Samaritans and selling them into slavery. Then some Jewish soldiers went up and destroyed the Samaritan temple, which the Samaritans then rebuilt. In Jesus's childhood, some Samaritans came in at one of the great three annual feasts where millions of pilgrims would come and visit the Jerusalem temple. On the morning of the beginning of the feast, Samaritans came in with pig's blood and spilled it all over the temple so that the temple would be absolutely desecrated for the feast. I mean, it was bad. So bad that to travel from Judea up north to Galilee, there was a trade route the Gentiles, the Greeks, the Romans would take, but any Jewish person of the day would not set foot in this territory. They would cross the Jordan and go the wide way around. They did not go the straight route through Samaria because there was so much tension. In other words, in those days, no Jewish person had to go through Samaria, but Jesus does. Why? Because there's a divine appointment waiting for him near a village called Sychar.

And listen very carefully. This means if I want to share my faith Christ's way, then I am going to have to seek close proximity even with people I do not agree with on many, many, many things. This is a real challenge in our culture today. Nobody, very few people, are crossing aisles anymore today. Now, this is just natural at one level. We all have a natural tendency to surround ourselves with people who like us and who are like us, right? We surround ourselves with people who are like us and who are like us. Exhibit A: let me show you a picture that's going to evoke feelings of dread for many of you today—the high school cafeteria. Imagine carrying your lunch, your brown bag lunch, into the high school cafeteria, and you're looking around for a seat. Whose table did you sit at? What group were you a part of? Maybe you were a student council kid. Maybe you were a jock; you were on some team. You sat with the cross-country team, the football team, the baseball team. Maybe you were in band or part of the drama club. Maybe you were a stoner or a goth or the art club or Spanish club or math club or science club. Whoever you were, you sat down at that table, and probably either very vocally when you looked around at the other groups or subtly in your mind, you looked around at the other groups and thought of them as a little less than you, right? Look at those weirdos over there.

The math club people look down on the jocks; the jocks look down on the math club people, and that's the case with every one of these groups most of the time. As adults, we do the same thing. We're just a little bit more sophisticated. Whether we're surfers, hipsters, Democrats, Republicans, whatever, we surround ourselves with people who are like us and who like us. And let's be honest, Christians are some of the worst at this. In our holy huddle all the time, I read a stat the other day that five years after becoming a Christian—listen to this—within five years, most Christians have no more non-Christian friends. Uncomfortable silence. It's our holy huddle, and it's true in our broader culture too. The term is tribalism, and it's getting worse. As a nation, we are simultaneously becoming more diverse and more divided. In fact, would you agree with this? It's becoming tougher and tougher to disagree with someone about something substantive and stay friends with them. We are all clumping together with people who look like us, act like us, believe like us, live like us, and all of us, me included, we're all guilty of it.

The problem is right now social media algorithms are promoting this to a level that maybe our nation has never seen before by feeding you friend suggestions who are exactly like you and news stories that fit exactly your worldview, so you don't have to be exposed to somebody who disagrees with you anymore. Maybe all this wouldn't be a problem, except it seems to be a problem for Jesus. As we've seen the last couple of weeks, you've seen him choose disciples. He is constantly reaching out to people who are in different groups, different circles—people who are gonna cause problems with the people who are already at the table, people who don't fit—and he's bringing these people in. If I am going to share Christ's way, then I am going to do it too because Jesus did it. But living like this takes real intent, real effort.

You know, this is one of the reasons that we want to build this front porch college ministry that Mark talked about in announcements, right? Somebody was saying, "But when you build that and you just open it up to the college community, don't you think you'll get some people, some students in there who are gonna be really, like really often and really, like really non-Christian, like doing things and believing things that we really don't believe in? It's gonna be very awkward, very uncomfortable at times." I hope so! That's the whole point of that thing. We do not want to have some holy huddle over there in the coffee house. We want to go out. We want to reach out. We want to rub shoulders with people who are different from us, but this takes intent, this takes effort.

How do you and I do it in our personal lives? It might be mixing it up with service organizations, neighborhood organizations, serving on local boards of local nonprofits that are not Christian nonprofits. I do that myself, like with Second Harvest and with Aptos Chamber and so on. I've had people come up to me more than once and say, "You know, you are literally the only Christian that I really know. You're it. You're the one here in Santa Cruz." That's what it's like when we don't hang out with church people all the time. And you know what else that means? That means you are going to have to risk being misunderstood by other Christians. In fact, I'd say if you are not being misunderstood by other Christians who say, "Do you understand who you're hanging out with when you go with that? Do you understand what they believe? Do you understand what some of those people do? Do you understand the kind of lifestyle some of those people live, and you're hanging around with those people? It looks like you're endorsing those people." If people aren't saying that about you, you are not living your life the way Jesus lived his life because that's what they said about him. Do you agree with everything they say? No, but I'm doing it because that's what Jesus did. Close proximity. I just want to encourage you to seek that in your own life.

Then I'm gonna do the next step, which is to find common ground. Find common ground. You could find common ground with everybody. Michael Sin's neighbors, they didn't kind of move in and promptly blast him with a gospel bomb. They found common ground around their shared Jewishness and invited him over for Seder meals and so on. Look how Jesus does this with the Samaritan, with this history of tension between these two groups. Verses 5 and 6: "So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, on the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was now the sixth hour." Where did Jesus sit down? If you read it too fast, you'll miss it. Circle the words if you're taking notes: Jacob's well. And the well. You know, one of the keys to really understanding the Bible is paying attention to repetition, and John keeps repeating himself about the well. Why? Because the Jews regarded the Samaritans as enemies, and the Samaritans regarded the Jews as enemies. But watch: both the Samaritans and the Jews loved Jacob. They both saw him as a revered forefather. So this is literally common ground.

In fact, I want to show you a vintage photograph of this well that I found these days. This is covered by a church, but a hundred years ago it still looked very much like it must have looked back in Jesus's day. That's a picture of common ground right there. And then watch this: when a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Would you give me a drink?" His disciples had gone into town to buy food. So this Samaritan woman has come from Sychar, which is the closest village. It's about five miles from the well. Five miles! And the previous verse said it's the sixth hour. That's 12 noon. So she has walked five miles at 12 noon to get water at this well. I don't know if you've ever been to the Middle East in the summertime, but it gets hot at 12 noon. How many of you have been to Texas or New Mexico or Arizona, like in the summertime, right? Man, it gets hot! Five miles in the middle of the day! So what do you think is on her mind? Water! A cool drink from that well! And that's on her mind. So Jesus starts talking about water. "Will you give me a drink?" What an example! How do you talk about spiritual things without being overbearing? Well, how did Jesus do it? You start the conversation at common ground. What are they thinking about? What are they thirsty for? And then give them a chance to enter a spiritual conversation if they're interested. How can you and I do the same thing?

Well, here's just one simple example. You could do this tomorrow: the question, "How was your weekend?" Say that out loud with me: "How was your weekend?" Wasn't that easy to say? Well, if you say that question, then you're giving them a chance to respond, and they might share something interesting about what they did over the weekend. Then you tell them, because they'll ask you, "How about you? What did you do?" "I did this. I went to this church service." If they're interested in talking about that, they might say, "Really? What church? Twin Lakes Church?" Maybe they'll say, "I've heard about that church," or they might say, "I used to go to church. I hated it. Let me tell you why," or "I'll never go to church again. Let me tell you how I was abused at church," or "Let me tell you how church is the problem and church is evil." And that'll be an interesting conversation, but you'll enter a conversation. But if they're not interested, they don't have to talk about it. And this is what Jesus does. Watch how the story unfolds. He asks the simple question, and he asks for a drink, and then she says, "I don't understand. You're a Jew, and I'm a Samaritan woman. How is it that you, being a Jew, ask me for a drink?" Now stop right there and let me ask you a question. How did she know Jesus was a Jew? How? He's asked her one sentence question; she's seen him for like 15 seconds. So how does she know that he's a Jewish guy? Well, this means that Jesus must have looked and sounded very unmistakably Jewish, so she knew instantly, "This is a Jewish guy." In other words, Jesus did not look like we see him so often in the movies, you know, a white guy with brown hair and blue eyes. If he looked like that, she would have said, "How is it that you, being Swedish, ask me for a drink?" But she doesn't say that. My point is, Jesus was part of his culture. He looked and sounded, enacted, and dressed unmistakably Jewish. But he literally takes steps to find common ground cross-culturally, not just with the people he would naturally relate to, to spread his message. First, Jesus, Samaritan. We talked about that already. But second, she's a woman, and men in those days in the Middle East just didn't talk to women in public. But Jesus did because he's waiting for her at common ground.

And then when she enters into the conversation, when she's interested, when she begins asking questions, what does Jesus do next? What do you do next? Third component: you have a simple, clear message. A clear message. Not a complicated message. A clear message does not mean you have to explain all of Christian theology in some 15-hour dissertation. Michael Sin's neighbors didn't do that. They just focused very simply: Jesus brings us joy. You don't have to know the answers to all the questions people ask. You can say, "I've got that question too," or "I don't know the answer to that question," but let me tell you what I found in Christ. Three bullet points under this point: first, keep it relevant, relevant to where their heads are at. It's obvious how Jesus does this. He says, "You know what? If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." Look at the beauty of this. He says, "Okay, we're all thinking water. We're all thirsty. I'll give you living water." And by the way, a little interesting detail: John's gospel is written in Greek, but in the Hebrew and Aramaic that Jesus and this woman would have been speaking, the word for living water, two words are "mayim chayim." It's a rhyme: "mayim chayim" for you. This is water better than anything you've ever had. Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

I love the way Jesus is making her thirsty for what he has to offer. He always makes the gospel relevant to where people's heads are at. She's thinking water, so he talks water. What's our cultural equivalent? I'll tell you another story. On the flight over to Israel almost three weeks ago now, Lori and I went over there a little bit early with our videographer Jamie Ramm to work on these videos for the small groups, and we were very excited. This is Lori and I have a strategy when we fly on airplanes. I like to sit by the window; she likes to sit by the aisle, and we always hope that the middle seat will be open, but nobody's gonna sit there so we can put up the armrests and kind of like flop out and pretend, look, I like to pretend first class. It's so fun to do that, right? And the flight's filling up, filling up, filling up. They're ready to close the doors, and our middle seat's still empty. We're so stoked! And then literally the last person on the plane comes down, spots our middle seat, and plops down right there. My heart just kind of sinks. Oh great! Plus, this person's not a very talkative seatmate. She's all dressed in black, and she just sits there like this the whole time, just literally like almost doesn't even move, doesn't eat, just kind of sits there. After a while, even my hard heart softened toward her, and after like the ninth, tenth hour of this flight, seriously, I said, "Excuse me, are you okay?" And she says, "No." I said, "What's wrong?" She said, "Yesterday I received word that my only sister was killed in a car crash in Syria, and I'm going back to be with my family for the funeral." We were all flying to Istanbul; we were then catching a flight to Israel. She was catching a flight to Damascus, to Syria. I said, "Listen, I don't know if you're a religious person. I hope this doesn't offend you, but I want you to know that I will be praying for you." A spiritual conversation just blossomed for the rest of the flight. You just never know when God has a divine appointment for you. Pray for God to open your eyes.

But I want you to listen to an observation she made as we talked. She told me that last year she started work in the Bay Area as a pharmacist. She works at Stanford Hospital, and she told me, "I am founded at how many anti-anxiety meds I give out." She said, "Now, I'm a pharmacist, so I totally believe in drug therapy and the value of medication for anxiety and a host of other things." But she said, "I grew up in Syria, and let me just tell you, there are far more people with far greater problems with anxiety in the San Francisco Bay Area than there are in Syria, and we're living in a war zone." I said, "Well, why do you think that is?" She said, "Almost everyone I meet in the Silicon Valley is super stressed." Now she said, "In Syria, we're pretty stressed too, but she said in the Bay Area, people don't have two things that you need to survive stress. Number one, you need a support system, and number two, you need to believe that your life has purpose, that you have a destiny, that your life has meaning." She said, "Most Americans I've met, they have no real support network. They really don't have any real friends, and they're starving for meaning." In fact, I'll tell you what she said. This is kind of a rabbit trail, but she said, "It's fascinating to see how companies in the Silicon Valley are playing into this." She said, "Almost every Silicon Valley company is using nearly religious language to motivate their employees. They're saying things like, 'We are changing the world for the better through making silicon chips for computers,' because they know their employees are starved for a sense that their lives actually mean something." She said, "I've observed that these companies seem designed to keep people there at work all the time. They have gyms, they have restaurants, they have childcare, they even have beds you can sleep on." She told me, "I'm thinking, don't these people have a life to go home to?" Fascinating conversation, but that helps me see what's relevant, what people are thirsty for in our culture. To the Samaritan woman, he says, "I offer you living water," and to our culture, Jesus might say, "I offer you a living vocation, a purpose for all your efforts. I offer you a destiny. I offer you meaning, and I offer you living friendship. I'm the friend who will never leave you nor forsake you, and I have worked out a system to give you a true support group in my body, the church." That is the water that people in our culture are thirsty for, and if you're exhausted and if you're dying for those things, you have to know that's what Jesus Christ offers to you.

So keep it relevant, and then keep it positive. You know, Michael Sin's neighbors, they didn't zero in on his atheism and attack it. They talked about the joy they'd found. Watch how Jesus keeps it positive. This is great. The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." He tells her, "Go call your husband and come back." Why don't you call your husband? "I want to get free water to everybody in your family." And what does she answer? "I have no husband," she replied. And Jesus says, "You got that right." Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you've had five husbands, and the man you're living with right now is not your husband. What you've just said is quite true." Now, if you're taking notes, I want you to circle the phrases "You are right" and "What you've just said is quite true." Notice Jesus says the only positive thing there is to say about what she just said: "You are being very candid. You are being very honest about that," and he says it twice. "What you've just said is quite true." Why doesn't Jesus at this point go into, "That's right, and you need to repent of that sin so you can get right with God?" Why doesn't he say that? Well, because nagging never works. It just makes people's defenses go up. When you're sharing your faith, your message needs to be good news. That's what Jesus's message was. Why didn't Jesus say, "You're a sinner?" Because that's not good news. In fact, that's not even news. Most people know that already. That's probably why they're not coming to church. This woman had likely not heard a kind word in a long, long time, and Jesus treats her with such kindness. In our culture today, this is so appropriate for us to do the same thing. You invite people to a relationship with Jesus before you zero in on all the things in their lifestyle and in their life that you think they're doing wrong. You have confidence that the Holy Spirit can lead them into the life he wants for them. You keep it positive, and then keep it focused.

Look at how this woman tries to distract Jesus because she gets uncomfortable. She says, "Sir, I see you are a prophet, I guess so. And since you know so much about me, and since I want to change the subject here, our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim the place we must worship is Jerusalem." Do you see what she's doing? She is going straight for the biggest argument the Jews and the Samaritans have had for 200 years, 500 years, 600 years—a total diversionary tactic. She is now trying to put up walls and raise controversy, and Jesus doesn't take the bait. He directs her right back to the important question: what are you gonna do with me? He says, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is Spirit, and his worshipers worship him in spirit and in truth." He's saying what's important is not what mountain, but what's the state of my heart. When you're sharing your faith, don't let yourself get drawn into controversies, the issue du jour. Don't take the bait. Major on the majors. Keep it focused.

And let me just say this: maybe you're here today still trying to decide whether to believe in Jesus or not because you have so many unresolved questions. Hey, I have unresolved questions! The beauty of following Jesus Christ is you don't have to answer every question before you answer the most important question, which is, am I going to receive the free gift that Jesus offers? And then once you've answered that question, you've decided to follow Jesus, then you can work out every other question with Jesus along the way. And then finally, there's a fourth component, and it's this: a compelling vision. Starting in verse 28, the pace picks up. One thing happens after another really fast. Then leaving her water jar, she just drops the jar. The woman went back to town and said to the people, "Come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ, the Messiah?" And you know what this tells me? If you think, "I can't share my faith. I don't have a good testimony. I don't know the answers to any of the questions," this woman didn't know much. She'd had one conversation with Jesus. There's a thousand questions that could have asked that she had no idea how to answer. But she'd heard enough to say, "You have got to come check this guy out." And then watch this: they came out of the town, all these Samaritans, and they made their way toward him. And then at the same moment, the disciples show up. They come bumbling in, showing up as they often do in the gospels as comic relief. You know, "Hey Jesus, what's going on?" And they have a discussion, and they see all these people coming out of town. How do you think the disciples, who are all Jewish, are seeing this? They are seeing a race riot waiting to happen. They're feeling tension mount. They're feeling panic. They're getting aggressive. I mean, in the disciples, you've got Simon, who's a zealot. You've got Peter, who's willing to cut off your ear at a moment's notice. You've got these guys that are hot-headed. And Jesus says, "Calm down! Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest?'" In other words, by the way, that's also how we know this story happened in the summer. It happened four months before the fall, so it's hot. "Four months more and then the harvest! I tell you, open your eyes! Look at the fields!" He's pointing to all the Samaritans coming toward them. "They're ripe for harvest!" If you forget everything else, don't forget this phrase that Jesus says to them and to you and to me: "Open your eyes!" Those people who are not like you, those people who do not like you, open your eyes! Stop seeing others as, you know, fill in the blank: those people I disagree with, those people who threaten me, those people in that group that usually hates us in our group, and start seeing others as those people God loves.

See, there's two groups of people that Jesus is actually teaching in this story. He's teaching the Samaritan woman and all the Samaritans, saying, "I know there's been this history of animosity between my people and your people, but I have come here to invite you to sit at my table." And then he's teaching the disciples, saying, "See what I just did there? Now you guys go do it too with people who make you uncomfortable, with people who maybe you think are really wrong. Don't just holy huddle. Reach out to people unlike you. Get to know them. Have conversations. Love them as God loves them." He's asking, "When you see people, what do you see?"

I started by talking about Michael Sin, who we met in Israel this past Tuesday night. You know what Michael does for a living now? Michael is the Jerusalem director for Chosen People Ministries. That's an evangelistic outreach to people there in Jerusalem. And so I asked him, "Michael, somebody shares their faith with you, and now that's what you do for work. I gotta ask you, as I get ready to preach this message to our church this weekend, what do you think we need to know about sharing our faith that we often just don't get?" You know what he said? I'll tell you next weekend. No, just kidding. He said, "Just love people who are different than you." He said, "I was a PhD atheist. Nobody was ever gonna argue me into faith. I knew all the arguments probably better than they did. What attracted me was genuine love, genuine love. It wasn't pretend, and genuine joy." Because they saw Michael as someone God loves. When you see people, the others, what do you see?

Oh no, here come the Samaritans! Here come a bunch of people who are not like me and who don't like me. Can you open your eyes and see them the way Jesus sees them? Even if they're Samaritans and you're Jews. Even if they're liberal progressives and you're a conservative. Even if they're Republicans and you're Democrats or vice versa. Even if they're gay and you're straight. Even if they're black and you're white. But they worship on Mount Gerazim, but I disagree with them on some things that they say on social media. When you see them, what do you see? See, the key to this story is that Jesus invites everyone to the table before they've got their lives all straightened out the way you think they should straighten out their lives. First, he invites everybody to the banquet table that God is putting together, including you. You're invited to that table too, and you're invited to invite whoever you want to that table too, no matter what cafeteria table you sat at in high school.

Let's pray together to our great banquet giver, Jesus Christ. Lord, my prayer for each one of us is that our eyes would just be open. God, I know that opportunities like Jesus had with this woman to talk to somebody about the good news of Jesus Christ are going to happen to people in this room this week if we open our eyes. And Lord, it might be somebody in our family; it might be somebody at work; it might be somebody we just run across in the process of normal life, running into somebody at the laundry room, at the grocery store, the middle seat in an airplane. God, I don't know where it's gonna be or how it's gonna be or what it's gonna be, but my prayer for each one of us is that you would bring into our lives the electric excitement and the joy of being able to establish common ground and talk to somebody about the joy and the love that we have found in the good news of Jesus Christ. God, free us! God, free us! God, deliver us from tribalism and help us to realize that we have freedom. We have a mission to go to the other and to share with them the love and the joy of Jesus. God, may that be more and more part of just the DNA of who we are at Twin Lakes Church. God, I just pray on Sunday mornings when we look around that we wouldn't see just a bunch of people who are just like us and who like us, but that we would look around and we could see people from different tribes all growing and learning together as we follow Jesus Christ. And it's in his name we pray. Amen.